


The Book of Gold

by july_19th_club



Category: The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: (thank god), Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, I promise!, M/M, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, but all will be fulfilled in time!, once again i fail to use AO3 tags to their fullest potential, susan baby eat. my. SHORTS, there are more characters im probably forgetting about right at this second, welcome to chapter one of the fic i've been wanting to write for a dozen years, wish! fulfillment! baby!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2020-06-29 23:43:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19840990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/july_19th_club/pseuds/july_19th_club
Summary: This fic has been a long time coming. It’s essentially my attempt at providing a better, more satisfying finish to a story that meant a lot to me growing up, and means a lot to me now even though I’ve mostly ignored the author and much of the actual original content. So this is “The Outsiders: The Good Ending,” where the characters are gay, the tragedy is averted, the ending is made up and the text don't matter. From here on out, everything’s gonna be okay.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Our story picks up on the night of the rumble (which finishes about midway through Chapter 9 (page 145 in my edition), if you’re following along at home), and immediately departs from canon. Instead of this being the night where two of the three main characters die, it is the night they narrowly survive, and now everyone must live with the consequences of actually having a future. It’s narrated by each member of the main cast, taking turns, which I realize may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but the book was written in first person, and I’m trying to preserve the tone as much as possible, because of the nostalgia it holds for me and because the epistolary storytelling has a nice sense of intimacy. So far in my drafts I’m having a lot of fun swapping between the boys, trying to get to know each of them. Expect just a lil bit more cussin’ than there is in the original book. Idk. Teenage boys cuss.
> 
> Updates are one chapter once every month, hopefully every 16th. I know that’s a pretty spread-out schedule; hopefully it will allow me to write an ongoing fic without it taking up too much of my time, as I’m pretty busy these days. Let me know what u think of it, and as I get going, maybe even which character you want to hear from next (not a guarantee rn that this is how I’ll write it, but it might be an idea, so I’m throwing it out there). This is what we might call a sprawling story, so I don’t know how long it’s going to take, only that I know what scenes I want at the end. Maybe it’ll update at regular intervals for a few years! If you’re patient, I promise to reward~

_**The Morning After: 1967** _

_**Two-Bit** _

Later it will all seem like a very long dream. Nobody slept that night. Sometimes after a fight you’ll feel good, you’ll FEEL like you’ve won. But sometimes you don’t, like you know on a facts level that you’ve clobbered the other guys, but you still don’t emotionally feel good about it. This was one of those times: maybe because we still had people in trouble, because once we got there I didn’t even want to be fighting anybody, I just wanted it to be over. 

Maybe because of some of the shit those soc guys said on the way out, how I remember one dude in particular leaned in real close to me and said, “Your boy in the hospital? You better hope he dies in there, because the rest of his life is going to be shit.” And how I knew that was true, and I didn’t even kick the guy’s ass before leaving. 

So we’d won, if you can call it winning. At least the social shit was settled and nobody was coming after anybody else for a while. That was probably the only thing we had to celebrate. The boys from other parts of town sort of scattered, and the rest of us just went back to Darrel’s house and started cleaning up from dinner. It was something to do; made at least Darry and me feel like we were getting something accomplished. Him especially. I know he hates fights. I wrapped up all the chicken, started piling plates. He washed. I dried. Stevie took a nap on our couch and Soda screwed around with the TV but never stayed on the same channel for longer than a minute. 

Nobody said it, but we were waiting for his brother to get home. He and Dallas had taken off the second things started to calm down, and we all knew that we had to be up and ready for when they got back, because that was when it would really be over. Nobody brought up the notion of going on down to the hospital to join them. Maybe we should’ve. Maybe not going was like saying, ‘we don’t need to go.’ Like saying, ‘we’re not going because it’s not that bad’ when we all knew it was. 

Everything felt like it was shaking very quietly, I remember that. Like the adrenaline hadn’t left my system so I was just watching the world buzz and spin a little and right now Johnny was dead and alive both at once, and as long as we didn’t hear the news, he was still both dead and alive. 

***

They got back late, after midnight. Soda still hadn’t turned the TV off, and was sitting there on the floor watching the test pattern, which bathed the whole room in a sickly grey light. He hadn’t gotten up to turn the sound down, so it was beeping too, one long unbroken note like the world’s biggest mosquito trying to drill a hole in your eardrum. I was this close to getting up and hollering at him for the headache it was giving me, but then we heard them in the driveway. He switched off the tube and punched Stevie awake and we all gathered in the kitchen. _Good news_ , I thought, or prayed, maybe. _Please. Don’t tell me the bad_. Without saying anything, Dallas sort of shoved Pony into the room, glared around at all of us, and then spun right back around again, hitting the doorframe pretty hard with his shoulder before running back down the steps. The headlights lit up the side of the house for a second before he burned his way back down the drive and the noise of the crickets and peeper frogs swallowed him up. 

Nobody said anything for a moment, frozen in the last possible second we had before things either got better or a whole lot worse. Steve was the one who finally broke the spell. “So what’s up?” 

Pony shrugged. Didn’t look none to healthy himself, now that I came to notice it - like a ghost with his badly bleached hair and dead-fish complexion. “He’s alive,” he said eventually.

I, personally, felt like pouring out champagne and doing the fucking can-can, but nobody looked ready to join me. “Alright,” I said. “That’s good. That’s good news. Shit, great news. How’s he doing?”

He shrugged again, like he was so tired that the shrug was the only emotion he had left, and went over to sit on the only kitchen stool that wasn’t covered in someone’s junk. “Not good. I don’t...they kicked us out, okay? He was talking to us and stuff, and you could tell he was trying to make it normal, you know?” 

I nodded. That kid would be bleeding at the mouth and act like it was Sunday in the park just so you didn’t get worried. 

“He was having trouble breathing again, like real trouble, and they all came in and kicked us out and told us to check back in the morning,” Pony added, in a vague sort of voice so’s I could tell he hadn’t really grasped what was going on and wouldn’t be able to give us much of a better explanation no matter how much we quizzed him. The fact that the staff had told him to check back in the morning was encouraging, I thought. It meant they didn’t expect Johnny to die in the meantime. And it meant they were doing something to help him. Right? 

“Where’d Dallas go?” Soda nodded toward the door.

I wished, probably for the first time in my life, that Dallas had stuck around, because he might have been able to tell us better what was happening over at the hospital. Might being the operative word. 

Pony blinked, like he was too tired to even shrug properly anymore. “I don’t know. He said he was gonna drop me off.”

“Somebody oughta go out there and make sure he’s not robbing a gas station or some shit,” said Darry. 

Steve shook his head. “Ain’t gonna be me.” He turned around and went back into the living room to curl up on the couch. Soda reached out a hand and gently steered his little brother toward the stairs, and when all three of them had gone, I opened the screen door and went out onto the porch. Sat down on the stoop and watched the bugs buzz around the bare bulb. Inside the kitchen, Darrel finished cleaning the dishes, clattering them around probably more than necessary. He was right, somebody should go check on Dall, but I was too tired. Besides, I didn’t really think he was going to try anything too risky tonight - not when he was waiting to hear about John. Not yet. 

Sometimes it felt like I was the one who watched everyone else fall apart and pick themselves up, and I just stayed the same.

***

I fell asleep on the porch for a little bit, I think, but I do remember getting up and going back into the kitchen to put my head down on the table there. I woke up around five in the morning, when Darry started puttering around making coffee and putting away last night’s dishes. “How’s Pony?” I asked. 

He half-shook his head. “He’s just tired. This whole thing’s just...not good for him. Fucking fourteen, for chrissake.” 

“Hey, we all were and we did this same shit. Manslaughter notwithstanding, of course.” 

He pointed at me. “You mean it’s okay? That it goes down like this out here? Takes all this toll?”

No, of course it wasn’t okay. But that didn’t change much. “Point is, we’re all kids. Or were kids. It’s a reality.”

“Yeah,” he said. He flipped the dishtowel over his shoulder and poured about a quart of coffee grounds into the machine. “And now I got _a kid_ upstairs probably working up a massive flu, and another kid in the damn hospital, and another-” He stopped. I didn’t know if he was about to start in on Dallas like he was somehow Darrel’s kid too. I did think that by this point Darry thought of everybody as his responsibility. That much was obvious.

“It’s not on you to fix it, you know,” I told him. Doubtful he’d take it seriously, but I figured it was always worth a shot. If he was the physical fixer, I was the verbal one. 

“Yeah, it is a little bit,” he said. “Who else is gonna? I mean, especially for John. His folks won’t.”

I nodded. The smell from the coffee maker was starting to warm up the room, half coffee and half ancient metallic appliance odor. Someone oughta buy them a better machine. Outside a few birds whistled. Darry went to the door and opened it a crack so the cool air would come in and air the place out. “True,” I admitted.

“This whole fucking mess,” Darry said finally. He leaned his forehead against the screen door, face pressing into the fabric. “I’d be a sophomore this year, you know? Architectural engineering.”

I’d never had that kind of ambition, and it’s a crying shame that someone like him, who always had, was constantly denied it. “Buddy,” I said, which was his word, and then I didn’t know what to say next to help him out at all. 

“Yeah. It’s a mess,” he said again. 

He left for the upstairs again, and I waited until the coffee machine’s growling had mostly stopped and shopped around the cupboards for a mug. The door slammed open the _second_ I turned around. Coffee slopped all over my hand. “ _FUCK_ , man.” I pointed the coffeepot at the intruder.

Dallas.

For some reason I was shocked to see him here, looking mostly unharmed and not covered in blood or bruises or something. He squinted at me. “You’re dripping.”

He pointed at the stream of coffee pouring down the side of the tilting mug. I had a sudden urge to tip the rest of it in his face. Instead I walked it to the sink and set everything inside. Darry must have taken the towel with him, so I settled for wiping my hands on my flannel. “So?”

He didn’t answer right away, just took off his jacket, hung it over the doorknob, and stuck his head into the fridge, emerging with the very last can of beer and popping it open with the tip of his pocket knife. “Darrel’s gonna kick your ass down the street,” I informed him.

He raised a pale eyebrow _. Uh-huh_. 

“So?” I asked again. 

He inspected the top of the can, narrowed his eyes at it, and took the longest sip he could. Scratched his ear. Set the can down on the table. “Don’t know. They don’t have anything to tell us.”

“You came all the way here to say that?” I was relieved he’d remembered to update us at all, but no news didn’t feel much like good news at the moment. 

“I’m fucking tired, okay?” 

“Yeah, aren’t we all.” I poured the rest of the coffee out, refilled the machine, and started it over again. 

For the first time he seemed to register that I wasn’t happy with him. “What’s your problem?”

“You the only one who’s allowed to be worried about him or something?” I asked. I’d learned over the years that the only way to ask Dally something was to do it point-blank and blunt, like it was the most important thing you were ever gonna hit him with. And it still only had about a forty-percent success rate. 

“No.” He glared at the can again and took another unbelievably lengthy sip. 

“So you run off by yourself why?”

“Things are FUBAR, Keith, I don’t know.” 

Now I wasn’t just irritated, I was actually mad. Sick of the fact that he thought he could be disrespectful all the time because we knew it was his way. Sick of the fact that he thought he was the only person who would ever defend John. Sick of the fact that he couldn’t just let us into his problems once in a blue moon. 

“If you just came here to take the boys’ stuff, then leave, okay, they ain’t got a lot of it.” 

“Christ.” 

“Looks like you’re just here to help yourself.” 

He heaved an angry sigh. “You can be mad at me, that’s fine. But I have just spent the last seven hours in that fuckin baby-puke-smelling waiting room down there staring at the walls expecting them to come back to me with something other than ‘go home and come back later.’ ’S’in surgery. 'S'all they said.”

He sat down on the one good stool and shoved his hands into his hair, greasy not because he’d put anything in it but because he hadn’t washed it in what looked like a week or three. Pushed his face down into his palms. “I just don’t know, okay?” he said, muffled. “Bout held one of those bitches at knife point trying to get her to give me anything and I still don’t know, man, so, you know, lay off.”

I cringed. He didn’t see me. “Christ, how’d that go?” I was already starting to be less mad at him, what with the pathetic way he was starting to sound. 

“That’s when they kicked me out, so. Dunno.” 

But for now, John was alive. I tried to let myself marinate on that one. Believe it to be true. Someone else should visit this morning, someone less...antagonistic. If something did - happen - the worst thing we could possibly do would be to miss it. “Think they’ll let you back in later?” I asked.

“Uh…better wait,” he said. “I saw his mom walking down on my way back here. Looked on a rampage.”

“Bitch,” I said. 

“I dunno,” he said again.

“She’s a bitch, man.” I told him. “I met her.” I remembered those cold eyes, that way she had of talking. Like she owned the concept of her son. Like even John didn’t own that. 

Dallas rubbed his face again and drained the can in a third sip. “I kinda understand her.” 

Of course he did.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Soda narrates his perspective of the week after the rumble, and receives some unexpected news.

_**The Next Three Days** _

_**Sodapop Curtis** _

None of us got down to the hospital again that first day—we were too busy sorting out Dall’s screwup with the nurse and making sure nobody was gonna charge him with anything even though by his own admission he _did_ threaten her, had a knife pulled out and everything. He didn’t touch her, just sort of used it to gesture, but it still counted. They decided to ban him until further notice, but that was it. Darry said he considered that to be a lucky break. Then at home we were dealing with my baby brother, who’d worked himself up into a major flu just exactly the way Darry had predicted he would. I was the one who spent the most time with him, got him juice and checked his temperature and stuff. He’s always been a really bad sick person and he always spikes a fever really quick and sits around halfway delirious. Normally I could deal with that and help him laugh his way through it and it’d be over quickly, but this time it dragged out a bit. I love my brother, really, but at times that week it felt like his was the least of our problems. 

For starters, of course, John. I’d only gotten to go see him once before he got worse, and he was pretty bad off then, forcing himself to stay awake when you could tell he really didn’t want to be, trying to talk to everybody with this half-dead voice. You could tell he was doing his damndest to make it normal, and I don’t really know whether he realized how badly hurt he was, or that we were expecting him to die. It was the most scared I’d ever been about one of my friends.

And the weird part is, I think it would’ve been even worse if it was any other one of us, because you would expect it less. Does that make sense? I mean that he was like...do you know the book _Little Women_? We read it in junior high, and it was actually one of the only books in school I got almost all the way through because I wanted to know what was going to happen with the one that’s a writer. Then that guy jilted her for her sister and I got bored. Anyway, there’s that other sister who’s always just really sweet and frail and you’re sad when she gets sick and dies but it also doesn’t really surprise you? So Johnny was kind of like that sister, which sounds morbid to say, but it’s the only way I can explain it. Every day he was in the hospital I kept expecting bad news, but somehow the days went by and we didn’t hear worse. Darry went down on the second day and found out that he’d made it out of surgery but he wasn’t awake yet and they were only letting family into his room for now. 

We all figured that might’ve had something to do with Dallas’s antics. Normally one of us (okay, not me, but someone with more authority, kind of) would’ve lit into him for pulling a stunt like that, but at this point even Darry didn’t have the energy and Two-Bit wasn’t talking to him. So we let him do his own thing for a few days, which meant he mostly kicked around the benches outside the hospital and bothered cashiers in the grocery store whenever he went in for a pop or some smokes. You ever been to the zoo and seen the lions just pacing back and forth wearing a ditch into the dirt? It was like that with him. 

Not that the rest of us were doing much better. Darry was in this wallowing pit of uselessness that he was trying to avoid showing anyone. But I could tell by the way he had to be acting busy all the time that he wasn’t feeling good. He likes to be able to take care of things - and people, and he couldn’t do that now, so he dealt with it by putting in longer hours at work, getting home just in time to shower up, eat a sandwich, sleep, and start it all over again. That at least let me take a day or so off to be at home in case Pony needed me. He mostly slept his way through the week, when he wasn’t complaining about the food I brought him on the grounds of his deliriously mistaking it for stuff he didn’t like - so in my book that made him the lucky one. I thought it might be nice to just check out of life for a little bit, come back when things had settled down. 

Two-Bit was the worst, not counting Dallas. He spent the next few days at our house, and whenever he wanted clothes he just borrowed mine. He said he didn’t want to be by himself. I guess I hadn’t thought much about how he’d be affected, because he was really good at acting like nothing got to him. But if Darry was everybody’s dad than he was everybody’s brother, like, even more than the rest of us were. It had been so long since the first time John got hurt that I’d almost forgotten how Two-Bit had been then, but now it was sort of bringing itself back to me. He’d gotten really upset, even though it wasn’t that bad of an injury really compared to this and Johnny was mostly fine, at least physically. Two-Bit hadn’t let him go anywhere by himself for like a month or two, followed him around in school even, carrying his books and bodyguarding him and hovering around. 

And now there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t even really talk about it, since he’s awful at anything like emotions and that, so I gave him stuff to help with around the house figuring that if keeping busy worked for Darry it might work for him too. He normally doesn’t like cleaning or anything that feels like work, but in three days he swept everywhere, cleaned out all the burnt-on cake batter inside the oven (my fault), emptied out the fridge and cleaned that down too, mowed the grass, and organized Darry’s workbench in the mudroom. Then he sat around and pulled the fuzzies off all the blankets on the couch so he’d have an excuse to Hoover again.

And me? I was actually doing okay, I thought, sort of fielding all the problems and sorting through them and making dinner every night, going over to work when I could. The bossman, like I said, let me take some time off, because I had my brother to take care of. I was feeling...I don’t know, kind of capable. Like I was somehow holding onto the situation by the edges and maybe even helping it to be better, a little. I didn’t get to see Sandy a lot that week, what with things being so busy, but then she did call on the third day. I’d just had a shorter shift at work and I was home but I hadn’t had a chance to wash up yet, and and Two-Bit came down the stairs and said my girlfriend had called. He hadn’t gotten a message because she’d told him to tell me to call her right back, as soon as I was home. That was weird. She and I normally just caught up later if we missed each other. We weren’t frantic if we went a few hours without talking to each other.

So my brain went right into panic mode. When she picked up the phone, she didn’t even say _Hi_ , just whispered, “We got to meet up, we have to talk.”

“ _What?_ ” I said. I was whispering too, mostly just because she was.

“She said, “Seriously. Right now.”

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“Can we go to the Dairy Hut?”

I told her sure, and we hung up. Two-Bit was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, standing in the kitchen doorway like he didn’t have nothing better to do. “What’s up?”

“I don’t know. I’m gonna...go find out, I guess,” I said. For some reason I was inexplicably nervous. “Is Pony awake up there?”

He shrugged.

“If he wants to know where I went, I’m with Sandy, okay? I’ll be back soon. I hope.”

He nodded, eyebrows pinched together, and watched me the whole time I got back into the truck and left. Sandy was waiting at the outside tables when I got to the ice-cream shop, but she waved me inside and instead of getting anything, we sat in a corner booth and she leaned in. This close, I could tell that if she hadn’t been crying, she was about to start. Her cheeks get real pale when she’s upset, and she pinches her lips tight. I went to reach for her hands, but she had them wrapped around her chest. “Listen,” she said. “Before I...before I say anything, um...well, we’ve been together for...for a while, right? For a _serious_ while? You know, I just, I just want to make sure we’re serious, you know, because if there was anything you’d be scared off by...” 

For just a second I didn’t know what was happening, and I was worried she was trying to break up with me. Then it clicked in my brain, like a little switch flipping. Between school and work and just living on the side of town that we lived on, I knew what this conversation was going to be. I knew. 

“When’d you find out?” I asked. I didn’t really feel anything about it yet. Too early. And like I said, there’d been a lot going on. “Today?”

She sighed, like she didn’t really expect me to need a lot of explaining. “This afternoon. I called you right away, but Keith said you were at work.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I wanted to take the whole day, I was gonna go over and see if you wanted to go out, but I’d already taken yesterday...”

“Well, we’re going to need the money, aren’t we?” she said, and kind of twitched, like she wished she’d said something else instead. She looked down at her hands, almost glaring at them, gripping them together on the table. Then she looked back up at me. “Right?”

This time when I reached out she let me touch her. “Yeah, I guess we are.” I was still running on autopilot, but I managed to say, “What, this isn’t the time to _leave_. Unless you want me to. I mean, I’m sorry about this. Christ.” The realization was catching up with me slowly, and it occured to me from a distance that this was probably my fault. I didn’t think about protection maybe, I knew there had been a few times when we hadn’t, you know, bothered. Hell, were either of us even equipped to—

“Oh, wow,” I said. 

“Yeah,” Sandy said. 

“Do you want to...not do this?” I waved my hands toward her general midsection. I didn’t want to say ‘have a baby’ because _she_ wasn’t saying it but I didn’t know how to ask her about the other thing politely. “I could try to...find help,” I tried, “if you wanted to find a way to...Um. Get out of it.” I cringed. That probably sounded awful.

“I’m not getting out of it,” she said quietly. “I’m gonna see it through.”

“Are you sure?”

“Totally fucking positive,” she said, voice still so low. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her swear before. 

“Then okay,” I said. I took a deep breath and watched as she copied me. “I want to do this with you. If you do. I want to be with you for...all of it.”

She seemed to relax all of a sudden, like a weight had been lifted. “That's what I thought,” she said in a rush, “but nobody except you knows, so far, so I just...I mean...I just really needed to tell you, and that’s what I thought you’d say, but...”

But she had to make sure. I nodded. “What’ll we do about your mom?” I asked. I knew how her mom was—this prim lady who wore wool skirt sets and was really fancy for an East Ender. Nearly not an East Ender at all. Not the type to want this under her roof, or for that matter, in her life. 

“I’ll deal with her,” she said. “It’ll be okay. Oh, Soda?”

“Yeah?”

“When we have this baby—”

There it was, a word instead of an idea. A real... _thing_. I wanted to go see what it felt like, but if she had only just found out then there wouldn’t be anything to feel. Just her stomach. It wasn’t a person yet, just...a pre-baby.

“Pre-baby,” I said, like an idiot. 

She blinked. “Okay, when the pre-baby turns into a post-baby—”

I heard myself giggle nervously.

“Be serious, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and then added “Cassandra,” because I always used her full name to tease her.

“Alright, don’t call me Cassandra, Patrick.”

“ _Whoa_.” I waved my hands. “That’s taking it a little too far, don’t you think?”

“Patrick isn’t even your first name.” She rubbed her hands together and put on on either side of my face. “I love you, but serious names only, okay, when we have this baby we’re gonna have to name it and I don’t want any of this off-the-wall stuff.”

“You mean I can’t call it Sodapop Junior? No family names? Awwww, _damn_.”

“I know you’re having a laugh about it right now, but we really can’t, okay?”

“What about middle names?”

“No promises,” she said. By now we were both shaking with giggles, trying not to attract attention since about half the people who worked in the Dairy Hut knew one or both of us. I put my hands overtop of hers, still on my cheeks. 

“Aren’t we a little ways away from names yet anyhow? We have to tell people there’s someone to name first.”

“Your family’ll be easy to tell,” Sandy said, looking a little jealous. “They love kids.”

“Are you kidding? You mean my two brothers all the rowdy greasers they hang out with, that’s who you’re talking about here?”

“Yeah, but they all like kids, don’t they?”

She was right, weirdly. They really were friendly people when you got down to it. Well, except Stevie. “Hmm,” I said. 

“Well, at least they don’t have any stakes in the fact that we’re not married. You know that’s what mine’ll flip about. Yours couldn’t care two cents whether you put a ring on me or not.”

“Do you want me to?” This again hadn’t occurred to me until it was right in my face. We hadn’t even been dating for a whole year yet. If it wasn’t for our income at home, I would’ve still been in high school. A little pit of fear opened up under my feet and I pretended I didn’t feel the wind whistling below me. What had we done? “I could, if you want.” 

“We’ll see,” she said, not sounding too urgent, and the trapdoor closed a little bit. “If you want to. Can we afford it?”

“I think it makes your money stuff easier,” I said. I didn’t know if I was making that up or not. It wasn’t like I’d done research. Oh, God. The trapdoor opened back up again, wider than before. What kind of a father was I going to be? 

“We can talk about that later,” she said. She leaned forward to kiss just the tip of my nose. “Listen, I have to get back home now, mama’s hosting some of her bridge ladies over and she wants me to help her cook—call me tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I managed. 

“I’ll talk to you then.” Another nose kiss. Another reassuring pat on the cheek. I couldn’t tell if she was doing it more for me or for her.

We held hands on the way out the door, and she didn’t let go until I got back up into the truck. The whole way home I barely noticed the road. _My girlfriend’s pregnant. My girlfriend’s going to have a baby. Fuck. I’m a dad. A pre-dad. My father would’ve had a grandkid at, like, forty. If he was here_. 

Back at home, Two-Bit was kicking his legs back and forth on the porch steps. “Your brother threw up,” he said, pointing a thumb back into the house. “I had to go outside cause the smell.”

He could sit around in weed fumes all the time when he went to the Shepard boys’ parties, but he couldn’t handle someone being sick? Figured. “I’m uh...” I didn’t know how to say it. “Sandy and I, um...” 

He sat back against the stoop. “Yeah?”

“Nevermind.” All of a sudden I didn’t have it in me to discuss it with him. I went past his boots and into the house. It didn’t smell bad at all. “Wuss,” I said, over my shoulder. “Pon, you okay up there?”

No answer from upstairs, so I kept going and found him back in his bed, curled up sitting against the wall with blankets piled everywhere so all you could see was his head poking out. “You okay?”

He looked at me, bleary. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t want anymore sandwiches, I’m sorry.”

Lord. Some things never changed. “I haven’t made you a single sandwich in three days,” I told him.

He squinted. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, go to sleep.”

“I’m not that tired.” He yawned hugely.

I scooted across the bed and sat down next to him, reasoning that if I was gonna get sick, it’d have happened by now. He leaned up against my shoulder, this bony, sweaty kid. I ruffled his hair a little, then stopped when I realized it was full of grease. Tomorrow I’d get him to change his clothes and have him wash up over the sink. All right, maybe I knew a tiny something about looking after someone smaller than me. Maybe that was why I decided to say it. All of a sudden I just wanted to tell him, even though I probably shouldn’t. “My girlfriend’s pregnant.”

“Huh?”

“Sandy. She’s gonna have a baby. She just found out, so it won’t be for a while yet, but. Yeah.”

“No way.” 

“Yup.”

“Naw.”

“No, this is real, bud, you’re gonna be an uncle.”

He didn’t say anything for a second. Finally: “That’s...really...” and then when he didn’t say anything again for another half minute, I realized he’d fallen asleep. I left him like that, propped up in his pillow nest. That night at dinner I got him to come downstairs and eat some mashed potatoes, and he didn’t remember a thing about what we’d talked about, which I’d kind of expected if I’m being honest with you. We were quiet while we ate, but as Two-Bit and I were cleaning up Darry got home from work and said he’d stopped by the hospital on his way back and asked at the front desk and Johnny was awake. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was excited to do a section with Soda, especially because when I first read the book I always assumed that his girlfriend had broken up with him because she'd gotten pregnant, and her mother had shipped her off to have it *taken care of* in a hush-hush way as they often did in those days...but it was never really addressed in the text, so later I realized some folks assumed she was cheating on him or some other explanation. I never liked that, since I always had a soft spot for Soda and therefore one for her by proxy. Not to give too much away, but they've got an arc in this thing.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed what was essentially another setup chapter - the major arc comes into play next month, because next month Dallas tells some of the story, and uh Boy Will He Have Some Things To Say. Until then!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dallas reflects.

_**The Third Day** _

_**Dallas WInston** _

There was this plan I had for myself, and it was so simple that I figured not even I could fuck it up: _be here, as long as he is here_. It was a good plan, uncomplicated—had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Be here as long as he is here.

Well. I’ll tell you how that worked out.

***

In the beginning, the first time I saw him, I was at Tim’s place, which later on I thought was strange given that I’d never again see him at Tim’s. This was back when I first came to town semi-permanently, because Tim had mentioned that it was a good town to get a rodeo gig in, and because I knew people here already. I didn’t have anywhere to stay, so Tim let me crash at his place and I got a job doing barn work at the Six Q. Used to come home every night after sunset covered in sweat and stinking like manure, walking from that right into another Shephard party. You couldn’t use the shower because there was always someone in the bathroom, sick or getting high, so I got used to sitting around waiting until things got quiet.

Tim’s place was cramped and lit completely by different lamps, so you had low dark corners and the red energy of a lot of people in a small space. With the cigarette smoke and the body heat it was a little like being inside some place that was on fire just a tiny bit. I remember seeing him at the side of the room, under one of the taller lamps, just standing there. Not being creepy, just observing, lit up all brown and gold. I could see his eyes across the room, remember noticing how dark they were. He seemed to be saying something, but I couldn’t hear him, and I never got close enough to ask.

The next time I saw him was two weeks later sitting at Two-Bit Matthews’s kitchen table eating a cheese sandwich. He was a lot softer-looking than he’d seemed that night at Tim’s. He kept tipping his chair backwards until it hit the wall and then rocking forward again. His hair was black against Mrs. Matthews’s leafy green wallpaper. “Who are you,” I asked him. “Do I know you?”

He shrugged, tipped his chair back. “I’m Johnny,” he said.

And I wondered if the first time had been real.

***

In the middle, I learned who he was, and who his people were. Back in those early days I wasn’t expecting to fall in so tight with his group, not when I already had a crew with the Shepherds and everybody around them. But Two-Bit and I knew each other, and because Two-Bit knew him, I kept coming back. I don’t know what we were, me and John, what to call it. Mostly we just observed each other. He was quiet, but I never got the idea that he didn’t want to be around people. He was just shy and kind of the nervous type. He was a lot less serious than he looked, though, once you got to know him. He had a needle-y sense of humor that he’d sometimes let out if he was feeling confident, usually when you least expected it, and then everybody would sort of clap him on the back and get all excited.

He was always hanging around with the youngest Curtis kid, even though he was almost seventeen by the time all that shit went down. I got the idea that he did it because he wanted to be somebody’s protector. Mostly the rest of them treated him like he was the baby. He wasn’t, but I found out why they did that after a while. Every crowd has at least one kid whose parents are the ultimate shitstains, and in their crew, it was him. 

I didn’t meet them personally for a long time, the parents, but I heard enough about them when he wasn’t in the room. Mostly from Two-Bit, who never got angry because he was frankly just too lazy, but made an exception for Jim and Maria Cade. According to him, the only time John was safe in his house was when they ignored him. The rest of the time – the times Jim was home and in a bad mood, or Maria had a day off and was looking for something to belittle – he’d find an excuse not to be there. He’d hang out at someone else’s house, or sleep outside. On couches around town. On park benches with newspaper tucked inside his coat. That kind of stuff.

This I never heard about from Johnny. He wasn’t a complainer.

So he was the baby of the gang, and he was just about keeping his head above water. Even went to school regularly, which is the exception in that part of town. If you asked him he was no good at it, not the reading, not the memorizing, but he kept trying anyway, which you had to respect. I figured girls must love him there, what with that whole lost-puppy routine of his. He didn’t know he was doing it, either, which made it better somehow. He’d walk around with his hair slicked all curly and greased and his shoulders tucked in, talking (when he did) in this soft, gentle voice, and I’d have bet money those little broads fucking _melted_.

Once I started thinking stuff like that, I began to wonder if I might have some kind of feelings for this dude.

It wouldn’t have been the first time. I had spent enough nights at guy’s places to know how it went, careful, quick, no-fuss. That usually worked for me, because I never got it bad for anyone very long, not when I was with girls either. Usually I got bored, or they did. I always thought that if we could get sick of each other at the same time, it wouldn’t be such a bad setup, but it never worked out that way for me. Got my heart broke, broke hearts. But this… I don’t know, this was something else.

I didn’t think it had anything to do with seeing someone I’d thought was him at Tim’s house once upon a time. It had to do with _Johnny_ , who at first almost never talked to me directly and didn’t always seem like he even liked me, but who also never said that he _didn’t_. According to Two-Bit, who was the only one who kept track of who liked who better, he was mostly fine with me. Was just – this was Two-Bit’s word – intimidated. That had been an advantage for me in the past. Kept things from getting too serious, if they were indeed developing.

But now it was the thing that meant I couldn’t be friends with this kid. I wanted to know him. Understand how he could grow up in the house he did and not turn out bitter or cold. Never raise his voice. Not be the type to lay blame, or hold grudges. He was the one who diffused fights and arguments just by being in a room. That was his power, that people knew that about him and just loved him for it. He baffled me. I barely had a year on him but it seemed like we were two different species. So maybe I didn’t like him more than everyone else, not at first. But God, I think I wanted to.

Anyway, I didn’t talk to him alone until I’d known him for months. I knew about his habit of walking around at night, because Darrel Curtis used to gripe about it. I’d moved out of Tim’s by then, but I’d started to not be able to sleep. I’d got used to all the noise at his place. So I’d got for walks, and one night we ran into each other up near the baseball diamond, and we went through the park together in silence, me watching him without trying to act like I was because I didn’t want to make him nervous. He already moved like he was cold or scared, shoulders hunched, collar up, but he did that even during the day. We sat down outside the dugout and he said he came up here to look at the sky.

The first thing that popped out of my mouth was, “You’re already sleeping outside.” _Why? Why was that what I said?_ Was I _trying_ to antagonize him? The real answer was yes, I was. But I couldn’t tell you why I felt the need to do that.

He shrugged. “Yeah. I don’t know, it’s better here.”

I looked up. The diamond was clear of things like power lines or tree branches, so it was all kind of spread out up there. I didn’t know any constellations, and he didn’t either, but we sat there and I tried to figure out what there was about it that didn’t just bore him to tears. I snuck a sideways glance at his face, upturned and tight with tiredness. He had bags under his eyes and I could see goose bumps on his neck, but he looked up at that sky for an unbelievably long amount of time without even blinking.

“So, what’s the deal with this? Just like the quiet?” I got antsy if it was too quiet, which was why I’d spoken up, but the interruption seemed to throw him off.

“No, I…I mean, yeah, I like the quiet. But it’s not that.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. So I said, “I’m serious, don’t you get bored?”

He shook his head. “Course not.”

“How come?”

His jaw tightened a tiny bit, like he was sick of me asking questions but was too nice or too anxious to tell me that. “Cause it’s not boring. Look at it, it’s huge.”

He said the word ‘huge’ like it had some kind of extra significance, as in ‘powerful’ or ‘awful’ or ‘too much to take in’. I’ll be honest, I didn’t like big open landscapes like that. Made me feel too small, like some big hand was gonna come along and grab me or a hole would open up and suck me in. Nature creeped me out. And also, I get bored easy.

“Yeah, space, man,” I said, knowing my tone made me sound like an asshole and yet unable to shut myself up. “Far out. Crazy.”

He turned away from his stargazing to give me a look that wasn’t quite a glare but wasn’t totally polite either. “No night skies, huh? What about…uh, rain? Thunderstorms? You seem like the kind of person who likes the rain.”

Was I supposed to be agreeing? Nodding along? Joining in the fantasy? To be honest I was confused about what he was trying to accomplish. Who says that kind of stuff to another guy if he’s not trying to come on to him? Was he, in his own weird way, flirting? Was I supposed to be flirting back? The fact that I couldn’t tell pissed me off. Most of the times I’d been with guys, we’d been pretty straightforward about our intentions. And this was something like the first real conversation the two of us had ever had. Besides, it was _John_. Seemed like he might just be genuinely, earnestly interested in this cheesy sort of stuff. And the thing I have to explain is that I didn’t know why I sort wanted to kill that look on his face, that open starry look that I hadn’t expected but should have. I didn’t know why.

He said, “The ocean?”

“I grew up in New York,” I told him. “The ocean’s gross.”

“Jeez, you’re boring,” he said, but in a teasing way. “What _do_ you like?” Then he added, still reaching, “Sunsets?”

His voice was soft and eager, like maybe this was going to be the one, and suddenly I wasn’t even in the vicinity of being in the mood. “Look,” I said. I hadn’t meant to snap, but suddenly there was vitriol in my voice and I had raised it enough to make him flinch. “I’m not gonna play fucking Pollyanna with you, all right, I don’t live that kind of life. That’s one thing you should know about me. And if you were smart-“

“If I was smart what? I’d do what?”

It sat unspoken between us, but I think we both knew it was there. He must have heard about my history, the fights I’d been in, the reasons I’d spent time in jail. _Get like you?_

“You’d look around yourself, be more fucking realistic,” I said at last, which I didn’t think was being too harsh.

His face fell immediately. For a second we just sat there, and I had to look at my hands to avoid seeing his expression. Finally he said, “I. I am. Being realistic. I like those things, all right? I think they’re good. There’s still plenty of that going around, all right? I’m sorry you don’t know that.” He pulled his coat around himself a little tighter. “Didn’t have to be an ass.”

“Sorry,” I said. As a rule I didn’t much try not to disappoint people. I tended to figure it as their fault for having had high expectations. But you couldn’t disappoint him without feeling like the worst kind of trash, and ten minutes into our first real conversation, I was figuring that out.

“You could’ve just said no.”

“Sorry,” I said again. We got up at the same time, in silence. “I’ll see you,” I said. We walked off separate ways, but the next day he didn’t bring it up or even act like we’d had a fight. Instead he sat next to me when a couple of us went to get burgers, and said he wanted someone to go to the tracks with later on and would I be interested? I went. We talked about TV and stuff, I think. We found a little pond on the walk there and chucked rocks. Part of me suspected this was some kind of campaign to get me to enjoy the fruits of life or whatever, but the rest of me just accepted it as a peace offering. We weren’t suddenly friends then – but we weren’t _not_ friends either. Things were different. I wasn’t sure how.

So I made an effort to listen to him if he ever asked me for anything, just so he knew I respected him. In return, he laid off the Pollyanna shit, at least for the most part. The closest we got to talking about our different views of life was in a joking way after that. “You hate stuff, uh, recreationally,” he said one time. I forget what I was complaining about then. “I get it.”

He didn’t, and we both knew that, but that’s what it was like. He still thought there was a point, and I was still waiting for the moment the penny dropped and he realized there wasn’t one, _isn’t_ one. But if we talked about it like it was a joke, we could function. I could live like that, waiting just outside his orbit. And I did, for a long time, even after what went down awhile back.

See, he got hit by some of those rich kids from across town, the socs, the poor kids would call them, which didn’t make much sense to me but you know, why does anyone call people anything? It was one of those things that sounded stupid, but just stuck. So when this stupid-sounding gang came up and jumped him one day, and I mean in the middle of broad daylight when he just happened to be alone for five seconds, I _expected_ it to change him. I did. I wasn’t as surprised as the rest of them when their little baby boy started to develop an edge, because I’d figured from the beginning that it was only a matter of time.

I think John was surprised too, once he got over the shock and pain. I doubt he’d ever had to consider it before, what it does to you, when you get dragged out of your everyday world like that and all of a sudden you don’t have no power. I mean sure, he had his understanding of suffering, and I’m not trying to pretend like it was easy for him before. But it’s a different kind of thing, right, the dull hurt that you’ve lived with all your life and one that comes out of nowhere, that you’re not expecting, that reminds you where you stand in the world and who all stands above you. I wasn’t there at the time, but I’ve pictured it often, the shiny leather of those rich boy’s shoes, the way none of them would have had brass knuckles but most of ‘em would’ve had rings. The taunts. They always sort of taunt you first, right, gotta get a few quips out before they beat your head in. He said he’d tried to fight back, but just one skinny dude who’s spent most of his life learning how to dodge blows, not stand them, versus six or seven football brute types who consider stuff like this to be another kind of practice?

He never stood a chance.

Later they got him back to somebody’s house and cleaned him up and he had a couple scars, only one that stuck, and he did change. I was right. He’d had to learn the hard way, and what it did to him was it gave him a reason to be paranoid and start carrying a blade and slouching around with the spark of fear in his big damn eyes. Still a dreamer, still the sweetest guy we knew, but also the twitchiest now. 

I’d seen enough people start like that. Sweet and blameless, and then sweet but scared, and then all of a sudden they’re not sweet anymore. That’s when I began to have different opinions about what his toughening up would do to him. It would keep him alive, yes. I knew that. It had kept me alive. But who was John without a sheepish aw-shucks grin, a reassuring pat on the arm, you’ll get her next time, bud, don’t worry, meantime come play cards with us, come to the movies, come sit on a park bench and count the fucking birds? Who was a John who didn’t think there was a point?

I was secretly glad to see that while he changed, he didn’t change _that_ far. Against myself, I began to hope he never would.

***

Now I hoped for other things. They’d kicked me out of the waiting room the other day, for harassing and disturbing the nurse, which to be fair was exactly what I was doing, but I was desperate and I hadn’t slept or eaten and all I wanted was answers, please, lady. _Please_. She had taken a look at my hand and seen there was a knife in it, which to be honest I barely remembered taking out, and called for help and two orderlies had shoved me outside and told me not to come in there again.

So I waited outside. I found some benches where the nurses and staff would go out to smoke on their breaks, and every time somebody came out I’d ask them for news. I worked out after an entire morning that I was waiting by the wrong wing, so I found the one I thought he was in and loitered there instead. I had to keep leaving so that I couldn’t be charged for the loitering, but if I timed it right, left and came back on more or less a schedule, I could get there right when the shifts were changing or the breaks were happening. Spent two close to three days like that. Eventually I got this nurse, Clare I think her name was, who was in his ward at night and felt bad enough for me to tell me what was going on. She was real curt about it, you know, brisk, but she said there had been some surgery, that he’d come out of it, that they were waiting for him to wake up. It was family-only visiting right now for him, she said.

I asked her point-blank when the last time was that any of John’s family had come in. She said she hadn’t seen anyone on her shifts, but that she could ask her colleagues, if it meant that much to me.

I said, why don’t you do me one better, why don’t you get me in there so I can see him for myself.

She wanted to know about my reasons, all that stuff, and I wound up telling her that we’d grown up together (not true) and he was like a brother to me (hopefully not true) and that I just had to know, it was my responsibility to look out for him, like (I figured that was close enough to true as would make no difference). I got so into it that I started to believe my own hype, and she did too and finally she said she would let me in when she was getting on her next shift and agreed to keep an eye out for me if I’d agree not to bother any more nurses. She did it, too, only once we got inside and were standing in the hallway, me all nervous in case the folks who’d kicked me out ran into us, she stuck her hand out.

I thought she wanted me to shake it.

“No,” she said, and I heard the _idiot_ even though she didn’t say it, “Give it to me.”

I played dumb, but I knew she wanted the knife.

“I’ll keep it at the desk and I’ll give it back when you leave,” she said, “only I don’t want to lose my job, you understand? I’m taking a risk here so you can see your buddy. At least show me you respect that.”

So I gave her the knife, partly because it was a really good speech and partly because I was tired, and I didn’t see any other way in. She put it in her apron pocket and asked me if I knew where I was going. I had his room number memorized, of course I did.

He didn’t look any different than he had three days earlier, except maybe a little less grey, and the burns you could see that had crept up over his shoulder and onto the side of his neck looked _worse_ , somehow. He was breathing softly, nice and even. The room was so quiet I could hear noises from all the way down the hall, but Clare let me close the door and I sat there with him. I didn’t feel better now that I was there. And I was finding it hard to look at him, partly because I was afraid of what would happen if he suddenly woke up.

And because there was a part of me, a big silent part that kept sneaking glances up to the bed when the rest of me wasn’t looking, (a glimpse of his hand against the sheet, the darkness of his hair, saving these things and then looking away again) which knew. _Knew_. That he just wouldn’t.

I had thought I’d known what the worst thing was that could happen, that he could change from himself, that he could turn out like me in that way. Except it wasn’t. It was the worst thing that could happen to _him_. But I hadn’t thought about the worst thing that could happen to me.

***

Here is the situation, in the end: it’s the weekend before. I’ve been in the clink for a couple months, but I’m back and I’m just taking things easy. Eating good again. Blowing off steam. A couple of us are at the movies, and we wind up talking to some little miss ginger-hair townie girl, I guess Pony know her from school. Kid had a crush on her or something, I don’t know. Cute hair, Ginger, cute dress, absolutely fatal to anyone with sense and I mean fatal in the ‘you get involved, your life is forfeit’ kind of way. That’s not her real name, Ginger, but I know it has to do with her hair. Ruby or Cherry or something like that. Like a stripper.

Anyhow John’s talking to her too, all friendly and not even flirting because as far as I know he ain’t even interested in all that. But talking is talking, especially in this town. I can smell trouble the way somebody else might smell a storm. And so we’re at the movies, I’m sitting with my arm around them both and bothering Ginger on purpose because let’s be real, it’s a kick, seeing that scandalized look on a prissy girl’s face, and at the same time I’m trying to keep one eye on John, since he tends to have a limit past which you can’t joke around anymore. He’s the only person I let talk back to me, so when he does, when I needle Ginger just a bit too far and he hushes me up and tells me to quit…I do. I get up and chuck him on the back of his curly head and leave and pick a fight elsewhere.

It’s what I do. When I know I’m not wanted, I leave. Usually pick a fight. Suppose there are smarter things I could do instead, but I’ve never really tried to be smart. And that is the situation.

And here’s the worst that can come from it:

He leaves with her, Pony Curtis, some other girl, and Two-Bit, who’s good for absolutely fucking nothing and knows it, and I know it, and that was my first mistake, thinking a group like that was a safe combination. They walk downtown, everybody giggling and laughing and having a good time because I, resident killjoy and Scary Bastard, am not there to ruin the mood and break up the party before they push boundaries that shouldn’t be pushed. Meeting by chance at the movies is one thing.

Walking home afterward’s another. Everyone knows that.

Ginger’s on-and-off guy, this bigass dude on six sports teams who wears a ring I know and hate from that other time I already told you about, drives up in the street beside them. I can picture it clearly – John gets tense immediately, probably reaches into his pocket to feel the warmth of his knife there like a second heart, maybe it gives him courage. The little white scar on his face gets a little bit whiter. This is the part where I should be there to holler some obscenities and push them all down the street and make them run and then insist that the boys come with me to some party to keep them out of the way all night until it dies down.

Only I’m not there, so that’s not what happens.

What happens is this: the girls get into Boyfriend’s flashy blue Ford, and they all buzz off into the night. Two-Bit assumes the fun is over, pitches the number Ginger’s friend gave him, which he assumes is a fake (he’s probably right, for once), and strolls off to find trouble or crash on his ma’s couch. And the boys go home. Later that night, they both leave their houses, due to them both having fights with their folks at the same time. Difference is, Curtis shouldn’t even be leaving after a fight. They’re three kids in their dead parents’ house, slowly racking up debts, but Darrel knows better than to let his little brother run off like that. John leaving makes more sense, since his dad will use his fists and his mother, as I may have mentioned, is a world-class bitch. Either way, they’re both outside, strolling through the park smoking and braving the cold, when it happens.

Boyfriend’s back. He pulls that shiny car up to the edge of the lot real slow and quiet, so that the boys don’t know it’s there until it’s too late, until a whole carload of drunk rich bastards has surrounded them. There’s bargaining, hustling, backpedaling. I can picture the fear, smell its iron on the air. I’ll never learn exactly what goes down in detail – they’re too flustered and stumbling when they tell me later.

Thing is, you get scared enough, you can do anything. I think he’da done it if he’d been alone too. Had a good reason either way, if you ask me, and the way he tells it to me in bits and pieces the night it happens, they might’ve killed Pony if he hadn’t gotten in the way. It happens fast, a scuffle, the stabbing. Ginger’s boyfriend, dead in a matter of minutes. They don’t stick around long, they sprint off into the night and turn up at the house I’m crashed in twenty minutes later, still scrubbing blood off the blade, ghostly, Johnny asking me can I please help him out he’s gotta leave town he’s gotta go now, before they find out it was him, he’s gotta be gone, he just killed a guy, do I understand? Killed him.

All the stuff I’ve been involved in, never killed a guy. Had the means to, and would do it if I had to. I know that. Just never needed to yet. Must be lucky.

I pull them inside and I do this: I give them a gun. I tell them where to go, this old empty frontier church miles away, and they head out that night, hop a supply train and they’re gone for a week. I’m the one who has to explain it: to the boys, to Pony’s brothers. I do my best but it does not go well. Soda takes it particularly hard, writes a whole letter he insists that I bring his brother. The cops look at me briefly for the stabbing but the guy who owns the house I was in gives my alibi and the dead kid’s friends agree I wasn’t there. I imply that the boys are in Texas. I drive out to meet them when the week is up; the idea is that I’ll give them some money and they’ll go further west, find somewhere to lie low for a while that’s a little bit safer.

I don’t let myself think in future tense at all. What will happen doesn’t matter, where he’ll go, when we’ll see him again. Can’t think about that. I’m managing to keep it under wraps all day once I get there; we sit around talking, I tell them the plan, I take them for some food, and the whole time I’m in charge, no hesitation.

It happens as I’m driving them back to pick up their things.

_I want to turn myself in_ , he says, and I almost drive off of the road because I jerk around to look at him. He’s serious. No running for John, he wants me to drive him back to town so he can go turn himself in and throw himself on the mercy of the law.

I’m cool for a few minutes, I manage to ask him why, if he’s sure about it and all that. I don’t like it, but he’s a guy who can make his own decisions. And then he asks me, out of the blue, if his parents wanted to know where he was this week while he’s been gone. And there’s this look on his face when I tell him no. Like he expected that they would. And as much as I hate them both, I know from experience that if he leaves, after he gets out he won’t ask those kind of questions. Won’t see the point.

I can’t stand it, I tell him what I think. _Bullshit_ , I say, _I don’t want you turning out like me_ , and then it’s too late because I’ve said it finally, can’t take it back out of the air, and it’s too late, too late. It all pours out of me, hopeless, me nearly crying as we drive up the mountain, him sitting back there with his face set and I know nothing I say is gonna change his mind, but I have to say it, because either way he’s leaving and nothing will be the same, ever again. He can’t turn himself in, can’t, because if he does he will go to jail, he’s killed a man, something even I haven’t done, and then he’ll change more, and I think _I don’t want you turning into me, if you get tough you’ll turn into me, and I can’t stand the thought of that, because I can’t stand the thought of me_.

And, _it’s so easy to turn into me_.

And, _I can’t love you if you’re like me_.

I’m half crying, I don’t know what I’m saying, it’s all lies anyway, because I want to tell him that he has to look out for himself. _Just yourself, get tough, it’ll make you okay, it’ll keep you safe, don’t look out for nobody but you_ , even as the idea of him doing that coils around me like a snake and poisons everything I think he might have the chance to be.

It might become just another one of our dense, unfinished arguments if something else doesn’t interrupt it first. We reach the end of the road, but even before we see it we can smell the smoke.

***

Later we found out that they apparently used the place for Sunday school outings pretty often, so it being full of shrieking kids was normal. If I’d known that I’d never have used it as their hideout. The police speculated that the reason it went up was because someone left a cigarette out, maybe. And the sick part is, it was probably one of us, probably me because I remember I had one or two while we were sitting in the doorway talking, before we went and got the food. Dry place like that, it’s a wonder it didn’t go down years ago, someone said.

What’s the worst that could happen?

When he went in, I thought he was doing it to make a point. This is what good people do. They risk themselves for others. It’s not just themselves they look to. _Are you a good person, Dallas?_

I followed him in. Of course. The kid already had, and I wasn’t just gonna stand outside like an asshole. Besides which I was pissed off at him, for pulling the stunt in the first place and for doing it to rub it in my face, which was what I believed in that moment even though he wasn’t like that. Inside the air was so thick I expected not to be able to see anything, to have to choke my way through blind, but I was wrong. I could make him out pretty good as he forged in further. Past the smoke, the whole place was lit up, a weird dark orangeish light that stank like burning paint and barbecue and if I hadn’t just been outside I would’ve really thought I’d entered hell.

Be here as long as he is here, that made perfect sense, that was easy, but do something about it? Not if I respected him. Not when he was good at everything that I was not, and could still do everything I was capable of. Defend others, defend himself. Hope for others, hope for himself. Forgive others. Forgive himself.

I couldn’t fuck that up.

So I didn’t hold him until that day, after we’d cleared the building and the kids were all outside and it was just the three of us, ducking and hiding under debris like we were at war, looking for a way out that wasn’t already collapsing. Timbers were coming down by then. Got Pony out first, and when I turned around to try and hustle John toward the window it had already happened. It was the one main beam of the roof, I think, cracked in half but still plenty big enough to pin a large man, let alone a skinny sixteen-year-old. I don’t know how I moved it. Then I was pulling us both out through the grey rolls of smoke, crawling on my ass, hands covered in bloody splinters and grit, and out on the grass I couldn’t see anything except him, managed to get his head up in my lap, eyes half-closed, and I was coughing so bad I couldn’t talk, but he was too, too quiet, and then there were other hands getting in my way, me pushing them off, the sharp knowledge that it had not been a thousand years inside the smoke, only minutes, and it was just past noon on a sunny day and my whole world was ending, and he was going to die. 

***

Be here as long as he is here. It was that easy, and that hard.

Because it was the wrong pact to make. I should have been gone a long time ago.

But I sat and waited. There wasn’t much to do. Think about things. Listen to the breathing. I wasn’t quite sleeping, but I got to a point where I was almost dozing. Down the hall, someone at the nurse’s station had the radio on, just low enough that it was hardly worth the bother. Her voice (Clare? Someone new? I didn’t know) was a little too thin and breathy for the song playing. She sang anyway: … _becomes of the brokenhearted…love that’s now departed_ … _know I’ve got to find…_

I missed a few bars as a pair of feet went clicking down the hall.… _roots of love grow_ …

I finished the verse under my breath. … _all around…but for me they come tumbling down_.

The radio came and went, and I sat, and he was still there and I was still there, for now.

After a long time, he opened his eyes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GOD i am excited about this chapter 
> 
> This is an early update (by like a day), but again, I'm excited. It's also longer than I expect any of the next couple to be, unless things get really crazy, but I had two documents that were half-finished for this and I liked them both too much to choose, so I combined them. Clocks in at about 6k so we are in the big business now, baby. The tense switch about two thirds of the way through, and then the switch back, is deliberate - I hope it does what I wanted it to, which was convey a sense of urgency and put the reader (along with Dall) back in the moment. If it doesn't do that, or just feels awkward, lemme know! This is a fanfic, but it's also a chance for me to test out writing experiments in a low-stakes kind of way. 
> 
> I have no other notes this time, this one is about yearning and being horny and yearning some more, and the mortifying ordeal of having a future.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Johnny asks two questions and gets one answer.

_**Later, Night Sometime** _

_**Johnny Cade** _

He was there when I woke up. It didn’t surprise me at all. He’d been there before. Blue sky wheeling overhead, people shouting from a distant planet, his voice, my name, over and over and over, frantic. Everything closing in from the edges like the end of an old black and white movie. Or the Loony Tunes. _Th-th-th-that’s ALL, folks_. 

Down into a hot dark circle of pain and gone. 

***

Once later on they came running into my room talking about they’d had a fight, they’d kicked the other guy’s asses good. Proud of themselves. Talking about they’d done it for me. I didn’t remember what I said back. The memory cuts out in the middle. Someone switched off the tube in the middle of the show.

***

I watched him for a while before he noticed me. Tried to figure out what he was thinking, like always, but like always I couldn’t. I think he was half-asleep, half staring out the window. I didn’t know what time it was. Dark, night probably. I was too tired to ask, so I just waited until he finally turned his head and saw me. 

He jumped up, started fussing around, pushing my hair back, kept asking me things so fast I couldn’t even hear what he was saying. When I went to tell him to slow down my voice was dry; it came out a croak. I tried to swallow, work some spit up, and that hurt like hell. 

He spun around and for a second I couldn’t see him, just hear him puttering. By the time I turned my head far enough to look for him he was back. “You got water in here?” 

I didn't know.

“You want me to go get some?” 

“It’s okay,” I said. Something whistled faintly when I spoke.

He must’ve heard me, because he said, “I’ll get you some if you want, I’d just have to sneak around some is all.”

“It’s okay. What’s been going on?” I asked.

He heaved a sigh and sat back down. “I don’t know. I got kicked out, this is the first time they’ve let me back in. Actually I’m still kicked out. Found a sympathetic nurse.” He winked.

“You mean when you got released.” I’m only half following him. He’d got burnt too but then he’d gotten released from the hospital, I think. 

“That happened last week, remember?” 

I don’t.

“That was last week,” he repeats. “I’m good, I wasn’t that hurt. Naw, they kicked me out from seeing you, cause - you know what, never mind.”

“I’ll ask the boys,” I said. I knew they’d been here earlier. Couldn’t remember what they’d said or when it had been, but I had vague memories of the room being full of guys. Talking, smiling these pinched smiles. I think about it for a second and add, “I’ll ask Darry.”

“Don’t - don’t bother, okay.” You can always use the threat of Darrel on him. He can’t actually do anything to Dally, but he hates having to be held accountable. Ol’ Darry can do a great disappointed face and it works on everybody. “I might’ve been tough with the nurses is all.”

“Aw, come on.” 

“I mean - I mean, nobody would tell me what was going on with you. I thought...” He trailed off, like he was expecting me to pick up on whatever he wasn’t saying. I didn’t know how he expected me to do that, but sometimes if I waited long enough he’d just say it anyway. You had to sort of tease things out of him with Dallas. You couldn’t push it. 

I swallowed again. Maybe I should have asked him to get the water. But if he wasn’t supposed to be there he might get kicked out for real and some nurse would bring it. I needed to keep him there. Things didn’t feel real enough yet. Like I was far inside my body and only just looking out of it and it wasn’t really a part of me. He’d been talking like something else had happened, something extra, in between now and the last time I’d been awake. But I didn’t know when that was. What thing had happened. I could see the book still lying on the table from where I was. Bookmarked with the note I’d written. How long ago had I written the note? 

I wanted to take it out. I knew I’d said some stuff in there that was pretty bleak. It was a just in case note. It wasn’t for any of those guys to actually read unless...unless something else happened. But just the idea of reaching that far and picking the book up made me tired. 

Dallas reached out and picked up my hand, real carefully. I squeezed it, and that I could feel. Like I was a little more inside of myself than I had been. We’d never held hands before. He wasn’t sweaty or clammy or anything. You could tell he did ranch work though. The callouses. I’d imagined them before but it was a little bit of a surprise to really feel them.

“Been scared,” he said eventually. He took a deep breath. “Soon as you said you wanted to go back,” he said, “I knew it. I knew you were going to die.”

“But I didn’t,” I said, even though I’d pretty much thought the same thing. That was why I’d written the note and all. _Have to remember to get that out of the book. As soon as I got the energy._ It said some stuff about him in there too, as I recalled. Nothing too damning but if you read between the lines. Now it felt a little stupid. “I’m here.”

“I knew it.”

“But I’m here.”

He sighed again. He squeezed my hand hard enough for it to hurt a little, rested his head against our fists. His cheek was really warm, or my hand was really cold. He hadn’t shaved. It was always hard to tell with him cause of his being so blonde but it seemed like it had been a while.

Finally he looked up. Deep blue shadows under his eyes. “I...I have to...you don’t know how I been feeling, you know, I think I...” He shakes his head. “I gotta...”

“What?”

 _Just say it_ , I think, _please just say it, so I know how much of you is my imagination_. Maybe now it would get said. Maybe I was right. Maybe I’d say it. Maybe I was wrong, but I could say it - 

He opens his mouth and first I think _oh, no, he is. He is_. Every time I thought I had an idea, he changed it up on me. “John -” he said, and then he just stood up, very slowly. He lifted the back of my hand to his lips. Just brushed them. So quick I hardly felt it. Squeezed his eyes shut and then he turned around and in half a moment was out the door and gone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not too many notes this time: I think next chapter will be Pony's first chapter, smack in the middle of NaNo, for which I'm doing a different, original project, so who knows how that goes I may just try and write it at the end of October and schedule it for a month from now to keep from going crazy...and for Chapter 5 I have to actually do historical medical research, and exposition which is never fun in fanfic, AND try to find a way to accurately replicate Pony's voice, so fuck me I guess lmao
> 
> I dithered a lot over how long this chapter should be but in the end I only really wanted to establish the driving mystery and also get some pining in there, so please, enjoy the fruits of my labor. I'm not gonna lie John's my favorite to write and when I sit down to write on him my brain runs a loop of the *i want to see my little boy* vine, but I will TRY to keep him from being TOO baby despite my natural inclinations. His future chapters will certainly be longer as more stuff begins to happen; this one's just a breather.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pony visits a friend and finds a message.

_**The Next Day** _

_**Pony Curtis** _

There was this dream I was having the morning before we went over to see him again. It was snowing outside, and I was standing in the middle of the street outside Johnny’s house, waiting for him to come out the front door and meet me. We were going to go up to the church, which hadn’t been burned down, it was still there and we were going to go see what it looked like in the winter. We were going to walk the whole way, go on an adventure. I stood around for a long time getting colder and colder until I realized that he wasn’t going to come out of the house because he wasn’t in there. He was out here. He was _me_.

I looked down at myself and realized I was wearing his jacket that he always wore, the jeans one, with my hands shoved in the pockets the way he did. It didn’t seem weird to me that it wasn’t all burnt up. I was just thinking about how I was going to have to get moving now if I didn’t want to be late. I started walking down the street. When I woke up for a second I wasn’t sure where I was. 

My mom used to have this superstition about dreams: if you told it to anyone before breakfast, it would come true. I wouldn’t have anyway. It felt private somehow, but like it wasn’t my private thing to disclose, it was Johnny’s. At breakfast I said that I’d been having weird dreams and didn’t sleep good. Soda said I was probably still loopy from the flu. 

***

We all went to see him together, except for Dallas. Nobody knew where he was. He’d done nothing but hound us and hound the hospital since Johnny wound up there, but now of course he was nowhere to be seen. We waited around at our house for a while, but after an hour or so when all the guys were there except for him, we just left. Darry said there was no sense in putting off our visit for him if he was all of a sudden making himself scarce. I thought maybe he was already at the hospital, and he had somehow gotten someone to let him inside. At least, I hoped he was. 

Soda seemed kind of distracted on the way there, fiddling with his coat and looking confused anytime you asked him a question. "You got something you wanna tell us?" Darry asked, and he got this bug-eyed look on his face like Darry had hit a nerve. 

“Fine,” Darry said, “calm down. Wasn’t trying to ruffle you up none.”

So things felt sort of weird by the time we got to the hospital. I hadn’t seen Johnny since the day of the fight. I think I was scared to see him again, it’d been so bad the last time. I sort of hung around at the back of the group while we all went inside, and in my head I saw that night over and over again, how we’d gone in and he’d been gasping and gasping and the only thing I could think of at the time was to tell him that we’d won the fight for him. I didn’t even remember what he said now, just that he was trying to talk and couldn’t hardly do it and everything seemed way too loud and way too fast for me to pin it down. I think I might’ve been crying, maybe, and as we walked down the hall now and got closer and closer to him I could see it all over again. His breath whistling in his chest. His voice, too thin for me to hear and then his whole body seeming to deflate. We were still holding onto his hands talking about the rumble when we realized we couldn’t exactly hear him breathing and then Dally started shouting and got the doctor in and they pushed us out quick after that and wouldn’t tell us if he would be okay. 

And now we were back...or at least, _I_ was back. Dallas still hadn’t showed. Darry knocked politely on the doorframe even though it was open, and I couldn't look inside, I just stood there until Johnny’s voice, which was scratchy and weak but alive enough to cut right through the cloud around me, said, “Hey, y’all,” and I looked up and he was right there, leaning back against some pillows and looking better than he had all week.

That wasn’t really saying much, but he managed to give us all a wave as we piled inside. There weren’t enough chairs for all of us to sit down, so Soda and I sat on the end of the bed instead and Darry sat on the windowsill. There were some things in his room now, too, like there was this vase of flowers and some kids’ drawings, which couldn’t have been from his family. Maybe they were from well-wishers who’d heard about the fire thing. Two-Bit had thought ahead and picked some wilted-looking black-eyed susans from his mother’s front garden. We got them in a cup with some water and they started to perk up a bit, and Johnny said he liked them. Soda had cooked one of his chocolate cakes last night and had brought what was left of it, so we shared that around. It was kind of like a little party. We caught him up on everything that had gone down since we’d seen him last and Two-Bit told some stupid story about this fight his mother was having with their neighbor, and Soda interrupted him in the middle of it (which was a relief) and said, “Now listen, don’t think I forgot, okay, I know you were fussing about your hair before, now don’t worry, lookit,” and he pulled out a can of pomade. Johnny’s eyes lit up and he started laughing, which didn’t seem easy for him and made him wheeze a bit, but he let Soda fix him up.

“Now if they get on you about getting the pillows all greased up, you tell ‘em you were powerless to stop me,” Soda said, which was true enough.

Mostly Johnny sat back and let us talk. We all wanted to know what was going on with him, when he’d be out of here and up and about again, but somehow without discussing it we were all waiting for him to bring it up. He looked better, to me at least, like he had some more color in him and stuff. He wasn’t trying to move around too much, and sometimes he’d accidentally shift his right shoulder and arm, where it looked like the worst of the burns were, and wince - but then he’d sort of look around at us all and he wouldn’t say anything about it. It was Soda who finally did it. We’d all finished his cake off pretty good and we would have to get going soon, since he had to work later at the gas station, but for now we were all sitting there with full bellies, feeling kind of relaxed, almost like it was a regular weekend and we were in somebody’s house just sort of lying around. 

“So what’s the verdict?” Soda said at last. “You gonna be out of here anytime soon? What’re they saying?” 

“About...about what I did? No one’s said anything, ain’t been any cops in or anything like that, it’s...kinda making me nervous, to be honest.” He saw us staring and shrugged. 

Darry figured out what he was talking about first. “No, about how you _are_ ,” he said, real gently, using the voice he only used when one of us was real messed up. 

Johnny blinked. “Oh.” 

“You feelin’ any better?” Darry put an arm on his shoulder, carefully so he didn’t disturb anything. “They give you any better news?”

Johnny looked at him sort of blankly for a second, like he’d been put on the spot about something he didn’t know the answer to. “Can you reach me the water, please?” he said finally.

Someone got him a glass and he took it and had a good long sip before saying anything else. “Haven’t really been told,” he said finally, real quietly. He spun the glass around in his hands and just looked at it real intensely. “Still can’t feel nothing past, you know, a certain point, but this morning they said that could change, like...maybe I get some movement back maybe I don’t, so...I don’t know. I don’t really wanna...well.” He shrugged.

We all turned to each other without trying to be obvious about it, but he noticed. “Stop giving each other looks,” he said. “Just - quit making faces, okay, I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”

Darry went to put a hand on his shoulder again and then stopped. “Are you -”

“I’m _sure_ , all right, I'm okay, let’s just, I don’t care what we talk about,” he said. 

Steve kicked his feet up on the edge of the bed. “Well, y’all heard the man,” he said. Soda shot him a glare, but Johnny was kind of smiling. I was glad he'd spoken up. Normally I can't tell if he even likes us or not, he's just Soda's buddy really. But sometimes he surprises me. 

“Y’all missed the church people,” Johnny said, looking up. “They all came in here first thing, there was like thirty of ‘em.”

“How was it?” I asked. The last I’d heard from the church people was the guy who’d come with me to the hospital last week. I’d gone to have a smoke while we were all sitting around and he’d looked at me like I was an insane person. 

“Kind of weird. They had a card and everything. It’s technically for all three of us,” he added, and he pointed to the table, under the vase. “Here, Pony, read it, it’s a trip.” 

Soda grabbed it and read it first, and then it got passed around the entire room before it got to me, and meanwhile Johnny told us the story of their visit and things started to feel normal again. When the party broke up we all promised to stop in again as soon as we could.

***

“I do have something to tell y’all, though,” Soda said, when we were driving back home. “Don’t get upset.” 

“Now, see, when you start a sentence with ‘don’t get upset,’ buddy, what do you think is gonna happen?” Darry said.

“I’m just warning you,” Soda said. “Be cool.”

“I’ll try,” Darry said. 

Soda took a deep breath. “There’s gonna...I’m gon - there’s - Sandy’s gonna have a baby,” he finished, getting it all out in a rush.

Darry almost drove us onto the other side of the road and cussed. “She’s fuckin’ _what?_ ” He never uses words like that, at least, not normally. Hell, the only people I’d ever heard use that one on the regular were Two-Bit and Dally, and with Two-Bit it wasn’t a big deal because he didn’t say nothin’ seriously. To hear Darry use it was like a stranger was talking. 

Soda kind of giggled nervously. “Well, _me_ ,” he said, “That’s how come it -”

Darry swerved again and popped him on the back of the head. “Don’t be smart.”

“Listen, I _said_ don’t get upset, and _you_ said you’d try, now don’t crack us up and we can talk about this at home maybe?”

“You shouldn’ta done this in the car,” I said. It was weird, but the news didn’t exactly surprise me, and then I realized it was because it kind of seemed like he might’ve already said something to that effect to me before. “Did you...already tell me about this?”

“The other day when you were sick, yeah,” Soda said. “I figured you’d forgotten all about it.”

“Well, mostly,” I said, because it was a real dim memory, but he didn’t hear me because at the same time Darry said, “And you didn’t tell _me?_ ”

“Because I knew you’d pitch a fit!” 

“Of course I’m pitchin’ a fit, you - Soda, you _knocked_ a girl up? You got her _pregnant_ . You think that gas-pumping job of yours is gonna support a _family?_ You...” he trailed off almost into silence, and then muttered, “goddamn idiot,” in a voice that suddenly reminded me of a dim memory of dad saying the exact same thing about someone while driving the car when we were kids. 

We sat there listening to him breath through his nose while he drove until Soda said, “Well, it helps support _us_.”

“Yeah, because _I_ have a full-time job, idiot. Sandy’s not gonna have a job, she’s gotta watch the kid. And we still have what’s left of Dad’s insurance, too, remember? And our house is paid off, and we’re still broke. Do you even think? Ever? Is that what you do, or do you just dick around and then expect me to fix it up later?”

“Expect you to...I don’t _expect_ you to do anything,” Soda said, suddenly sounding very stiff. I stared at the back of his head and was glad I couldn't see his face. “I only told you because it’s happening, and you’d find out eventually anyway. I wasn’t askin’ for help. Kinda thought maybe you’d even be a little excited to be an uncle. But I guess I shouldn’t have expected too much, should I?”

Darry sighed, and suddenly he pulled the car over and stopped by the verge and opened his door. He sat like that for a moment, leaning out of the car with his head resting on his arm, and I thought for a wild second that maybe he was going to throw up. I sort of wished I was back at the hospital, listening to Johnny avoid talking about his condition. Instead I just stayed quiet. I somehow felt like if I talked, I’d get Soda in more trouble, although I had to admit anyway that it was kind of nice whenever I wasn’t the one being yelled at for being stupid. Right now _I_ was the brother who used his head. 

“C’mere,” Darry said at last, getting out of the car. Soda followed him, and after a second of wondering what to do I did too. We all sat down with our feet resting on the shoulder. Old blue flowers on wiry stems were growing up out of the ditch, and the ground was already dry again even with the rain we’d got last week. “Buddy,” Darry said at last, “Have the two of you, you and your girlfriend, right, have you...thought about taking care of this before it gets that far?”

“Yeah, she don’t want to,” Soda said. “I asked.”

“What do y’all mean?” I asked. I knew Soda wouldn’t break up with her, not unless somebody forced him.

Darry just squinted at me. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll tell ya later.”

I kind of got the impression that he’d find some convenient reason to forget to do that, but I didn’t want to push it this time. I shut up.

“Look,” Soda said. “I don’t have much saved, but if you let me pull back on house expenses until the baby’s here, then...I don’t know, I could maybe get enough saved to start renting a place? I don’t mean my whole paycheck if we still need some of it, just...half of it or one a month or...” he sounded exhausted suddenly. “Whatever you want to do.”

“No, save the whole thing,” Darry said. “Not gonna force you to pay the bills. It might get tight, though, know that. You’re gonna have to stop cookin’ so many sweets. No buyin’ records or stuff you don’t need.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. I know.” Then he laughed, that same nervous giggle. Darry and I both looked at him, and he slung an arm around each of our shoulders. “Hang onto your hats, boys. Things’re gonna change real soon.”

 _Didn’t I know it_ , I thought, and as a car drove by I closed my eyes against the dust. 

***

I did wind up going back to the hospital later that night, after dinner. There was only an hour or so left before visiting was over, but I didn’t have anything better to do and I thought I’d give Johnny the news. I ran into Two-Bit on my way in, who said he’d spent the past couple hours there, so Johnny hadn’t had to be alone much at all. His mom had come by for a little bit too, he said, about an hour after we’d all left. When I asked Johnny how that had gone, he said, “Okay,” and I didn’t want to bother him like we had earlier, so I let him leave it at that. 

Instead I told him about Soda’s news, and he was pretty impressed and wanted to know if we were going to name it like we named everybody in my family. I told him I wasn’t sure, Soda hadn’t mentioned it. Then I asked him if he’d seen Dally at all today. 

“Nope.” He seemed awfully nonchalant about it, but he shifted in bed a little and didn’t look me quite in the eye. "Guess I should've known better."

"What? Why?" Did he know something about where Dally had gone?

"Doesn't matter," he said. "He's gonna do what he's gonna do, okay? If he doesn't want to be here than he doesn't want to be here. That's his business." He shrugged.

“You gotta quit doing that,” I said as I saw his face twist up again. “You’re aggravatin’ it.”

“What am I supposed to do, not move? I’m getting bored.”

I had to grin. If I’d been sitting around in bed for two weeks I’d be stir-crazy too, and it was kind of good to hear him complaining again, to be honest. When he was feeling up to sassing you, you knew it was all okay. 

“Hey,” I said, remembering. “You still wanna finish that book or what?” 

It was on the bedside table, but when I reached for it and opened it to the bookmarked page he said, “No!” and tried to sit up so quick all the blood seemed to drain out of his face. “ _No_ , give it here.”

“Sure,” I said, mostly so he’d lay back down, and when I handed it to him he took the paper that was marking it out real quick and crumpled it up. There was a trash can on his side of the room; he waited a second and sort of collected himself, then aimed with his good arm and tossed it in first try. He was still pale, but a little grin flashed across his face. “Still got it.”

It was true. Even hurt, he still had a pretty decent arm. I remember when he was a freshman Darry had tried seriously to get him to go out for football, said that he’d look out for him on the team and everything, that just because he was a little guy didn’t mean he couldn’t be good at it. But Johnny only really liked pickup games, he didn’t like the competition, and besides, that was the year he got jumped, and Darry dropped it after that ‘cause he saw the sense in not asking him to go do a sport where he’d get tossed around like a sack of flour. 

I wanted to know how he felt about it now, the fact that his touch football days were probably over, but I didn’t want to ask and make him upset. He looked at me and must’ve seen it on my face, though, because he said impatiently, “Look, are you gonna read or not?”

“What was that paper?” I asked instead. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said firmly, and I knew I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him about it tonight. “Go ahead, read.”

“Well, _you_ took out the bookmark,” I said, but I was just saying it to remind him that I knew he was hiding something from me. I found the place we’d left off at pretty quick. Scarlett was the owner of the sawmill now, and her new husband had turned up dead because of that accident, and as soon as that happened she started falling all over Ashley again because she’d never really gotten over him, all those years later. Johnny fell asleep somewhere in the middle of her giving a passionate speech about all of her struggles, and I was kind of relieved to put the book down, to be honest with you. It was getting annoying listening to her complain about all the things that she thought were so awful, when her life was pretty good all things considered. Also, Johnny had pointed out after the second husband died that she was turning into a little bit of a black widow. “How much you want to bet she marries Ashley next and then _he_ dies?”

I didn’t think she was going to marry Ashley. He already had that other girl, and besides, he was too loyal. 

Anyway, after he fell asleep, I sat around for a bit, kind of mindlessly skimming ahead to figure out what I would be reading next time. I didn’t figure he’d want to do the reading for a while, it’d just wear him out. Plus, I was waiting. After twenty minutes had passed and he didn’t seem about to come to again in a hurry, I folded the corner of my page over, got up, and dug around in the trash can. It wasn’t long before I found the crumpled-up piece of notebook paper that he’d tossed in there.

It was a letter, to me. He’d written it, by the looks of it, a couple days ago, when things were really bad. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want me to see it now, but then I read it. 

I stared at that letter for a long time, and then I felt guilty for looking. I balled it up again and looked up at Johnny, who was still asleep, arms crossed over his stomach and snoring a tiny bit. Finally I stood up, and I don’t know, I felt like I had to do something. This crazy urge entered my head to just lean down and...I don’t know, kiss him on the forehead. I don’t know why. After a second I decided it would be too weird, and besides, what would I do if he woke up and saw me bending over him like that? So instead I just squeezed his hand real quick and went home. 

But I couldn’t get that note out of my head even after I’d had dinner. Darry and Soda were still talking about the money, but they weren’t yelling at each other now, just going over all our recent statements and punching numbers into Dad’s old adding machine, so I figured that was an improvement. I tried to think of places I could get a job at and make a list to ask, but that note kept coming back to me instead. The sun went down and I watched it through the bedroom window and I thought about that note, and I took a shower and thought about that note, and I went to bed but stayed awake for hours, hearing Johnny’s voice in my head as clearly as if he’d said all that stuff to me out loud. It would be a long, long time before I stopped thinking about that note. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it finally happened: I ran out of the material that I wrote years ago which just needed cleaning up a bit and got behind on the fic. Also last month was NaNo and predictably I couldn't juggle two projects at once. Sorry for the delay - next month we'll hopefully be right back to our regular schedule on the 16th. Part of the delay is also due to the fact that I wasn't sure how much research I wanted to include in this fic (or do, for that matter), so I kept putting it off. I think I've come to the conclusion that unless some legal or medical fact is *absolutely* necessary, I'll opt for the 'light sketch' instead of the 'tightly-written program' version of detail. This is for fun, and while I find lots of kinds of research fun, I also don't want this to lead me down a rabbit hole of 'would-this-realistically-have-happened-or-not' and never get around to writing. That said, if there's something glaringly off about some plot point I come up with, feel free to correct me in the comments & I'll go back in and make the adjustments. 
> 
> Unsurprisingly, Pony wound up being (weirdly) the hardest character to write in the voice of. Maybe because he narrates the book, and it's been a while since I read it, but I was wary of getting it too wrong OR copying it too closely. Hopefully I've struck the balance :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darry holds it together.

**_Fall 1967_ **

**_Darrel Curtis_ **

Parenthood. It’s kind of an ambiguous thing, isn’t it? Seems like it shouldn’t be, seems like one of those things with an obvious definition. But say your parents are dead. You _had_ parents; now you don’t. Say your parents don’t do right by you, or aren’t around even if they’re alive. You _have_ parents, but you...don’t. Say you’re responsible for people younger than you, weaker than you, even though you’ve never given birth or had kids of your own. Does that make you a parent? Or does it just make you a caretaker? A provider? Isn’t it the same thing? Say you’re about to give birth, or father a child, but the law doesn’t even count you as an adult yet? Still a parent? How does _that_ one work out?

See, I don’t know, but I always figured I’d be the first of us to have kids. Thought I knew exactly how it’d go. It’d happen when I was in my late twenties, maybe, but no later than twenty-eight or so. It would be with a girl I met at college, or maybe a girl from home who I reconnected with after I came back from school, or a woman I met through the job I got with the degree I’d earn. We’d get a little house. Start paying on a mortgage. Buy a sedan. The boys could come stay with us, but by then they’d both be in school as well, and it might make more sense for them to get an apartment together as bachelors before long. We’d sell the old house, and it would be sad, bittersweet, but we’d be ready.

I’d have a little boy and a little girl, and maybe their middle names could be in honor of Mom and Dad. I’d take them to the playground. I’d drive them out to the lake to go fishing and swimming. Maybe one day we’d go on a vacation, take them to an amusement park. Or a road trip, all the way out to one of those big national parks. I’d always wanted to see Yosemite.

Just a little, quiet, respectable life.

But to be honest, I haven’t thought about that life in some time. Always imagined I’d be the first to have kids. Just didn’t assume they’d already be almost grown, and able to get themselves into more trouble than I could ever get them out of; crimes and running away and hating any rule I made and getting hurt and hurting each other and...and having children of their own.

I didn’t get much sleep that fall.

By the end of September I was back at work full-time, couldn’t squeeze any more leave out of the foreman even though he sympathized with the fact that I’d had stuff going on. A routine developed again. I’d be up by five, drive out to the site, finish anywhere between three and six depending on the day, be back at home long enough to cook up some dinner, do whatever chores needed doing, try to sleep before work the next day. Whenever I had free time I’d try to sit Soda down and get him to focus on his finances. He has one of those brains that goes a million miles a minute, and he’s smart, but getting him to pay attention to anything he wasn’t interested in had always been like pulling teeth out of a cat. I’d get him started, tell him to write up a budget for himself, leave to check on the casserole, and when I came back five minutes later he’d be folding paper footballs or doodling on the margins of his notebook.

Pony was back in school, but only because I told him to go. He was over his flu, and I didn’t want him sitting around all day since he’d missed close to three weeks already. We were closer to midterms now than we were to the beginning of the year, and I knew he wasn’t always doing his homework. I was afraid to press things with him, though. Last time I’d gotten on his ass about school, he’d run out for the night and wound up on the lam from the police, so you can see why I was leery. We had an uneasy peace now, me and him, but we hadn’t talked about any of it. Since it was Pony, I doubted we really would. He’d just write it all down in his diary or something and…well, I couldn’t try to sit down and have a frank conversation with him. Whenever I did, we both started shouting for some reason and walked away mad.

Soda and I had always been closer. I don’t know any oldest siblings who are best buddies with their youngest siblings. It’s normal, I think. You just don’t have that much in common. But one day in early October – a Friday, because he popped in after school just long enough to tell me he was going to the football game with Two-Bit – I realized that him saying that was the most we’d talked in almost a week. He was always doing his thing. I was always busy with work. And even when we were in the house, we didn’t really all eat dinner together much anymore. Lately we got our food whenever we could snatch a minute, and then ate it in our own places: Soda in front of the TV, me in the kitchen, Pony in his room. I’d had to get on his case a couple times about the number of plates and glasses he would leave on his desk and forget about for a week. Once in a while Two-Bit would come over at dinner and we would sit on the porch, but even then we didn’t always talk. I was too tired, and he was too lazy.

That Friday, after Pony had left and Soda had gotten home from the gas station, I parked myself on the front steps and he came out and joined me. “What’s wrong?”

I shrugged. I’d burned the ground beef a bit and the bottom of my hamburger pie was kind of dry and nasty. “You talk to Pony much lately?”

“I mean, around the house. Yeah. Sure.”

“ ’Bout what?”

“I dunno. Stuff.” I got the impression that he wasn’t really listening.

“Anything important?”

“You fishin’? Just ask him. But like…not really. He doesn’t really do that, does he?”

Did he? Soda was the emotional one. Pony would have been, but he was fourteen, you know? He wanted to seem tuff, and tuff guys didn’t talk about their feelings to their nosy big brothers. Me least of all. We ate the rest of our dinner in silence, and then Soda went inside to call his girlfriend and I stayed on the porch until it got cold and late. Somewhere I’d lost my baby brother, and I didn’t even know when it had happened.

Next week his report card came in, and he snuck it past me without my seeing it. Two-Bit had showed me his for a joke – god knew why that guy still went to school – and that was the only reason I knew they’d been sent. I went up to his and Soda’s room while they were both outside and found it on his desk, tucked into the composition book he’d been using as a journal. I don’t read his stuff usually, but I did want to check his grades. They were awful; mostly D’s with one C in P.E. because no matter how much of a slacker you are, it’s pretty damn hard to fail gym. There was an F in his biology class, but that was the teacher that didn’t like him because he’d once had a misunderstanding with a pocket knife and a worm dissection. The one that really bothered me was English. He’d never gotten a D in English before. Usually he got little notes from the teacher that said stuff like “ _original work_ ” and “ _Ponyboy is creative and seems to genuinely enjoy the material – always a pleasure_ ” and once even one that said “ _perhaps a little long-winded_ ” which he’d taken as a compliment because it meant he was doing a lot of writing. Only one teacher had filled out the optional section for notes on this card, and it was the English teacher. “ _Inattentive this term – multiple incomplete assignments – what happened?!_ ”

That comment pissed me off a little bit, to be honest. _What happened_. Jesus, buddy, read the paper. I spent the rest of the day mapping out what I’d say to him when I saw him. I’d use a calm tone. I’d be friendly and approachable about it. I wouldn’t pressure him. _What’s been going on?_ I’d ask. _You said you were caught up. Want to tell me about it?_

But he _wouldn’t_. He wouldn’t want to tell me about it; that wasn’t what we did these days. And I’d be the bad guy for bringing things up like he was struggling, for not trusting him. I couldn’t say anything. If I brought it to Soda he might be able to make some headway – but he had stuff to plan with Sandy now. They were going to the doctor for the first time about the baby next week. He had to look for places to rent, and it would be tough going, trying somewhere suitable for a newborn. The places he could afford were real junk holes. If he found a decent apartment in the next eight months that he could actually budget for it’d be a miracle. It would be easier to do everything – housing, the doctor – if they were married, so sooner or later he had to go down to the courthouse and ask how to get it started. One more thing now would just make him forget something else he should be doing.

Couldn’t take the problem to Two-Bit. He’d gone out of town with his mother for the week, visiting some relative. It baffled me sometimes, his life. How it was the most normal of all of ours. And that was exactly _why_ I couldn’t take it to him, when you got down to it. He was one of the kid’s last connections to normalcy, to something that hadn’t changed since everything that had gone down. He’d hate it if Two-Bit got all responsible on him, and plus, he’d figure out that I’d put him up to it.

In the end, I went to Johnny. Or I meant to. I only wanted to ask him if Pony had mentioned school at all to him, since he’d been going down to see him pretty much every day. I felt bad, but I’d only been in twice since we’d all gone together. From what the boys had told me, he’d been getting stronger slowly, every time someone went to see him they could stay a little longer before he had to rest. But I still felt bad, because I knew Two-Bit and Pony were the only people getting over there regularly – Steve only really joined us when Soda was there, and Soda and I were too busy to make as much room in our schedule as we wanted to.

And Dallas. Well. Who knew where the hell he was?

When I got there, there was a guy outside the door, sitting in a chair reading a magazine. If I’d been paying more attention, maybe I’d have realized what was going on sooner, but I walked right past him and reached out for the door handle. It didn’t open. I jiggled it a bit; and then the guy got up and put a hand on my chest and walked me back, and I realized it was locked. He was big, bigger than me, which means he had to have been at least six-four. Definitely heavier, though he looked pretty young. His badge was right there pinned to his chest, and suddenly I knew exactly how the rest of the boys felt when they ran into the fuzz. They always talked about it like they were vampires, sort of, draining all the confidence and brains out of you, and I’d always been the cleanest of us so cops always kind of talked to me like I was an equal, but this one just looked down into my eyes and it – I don’t know, it really got to me in a way it never had before. 

I stepped so far back that I bumped into the opposite wall. “What’s…what’s going on?”

“You know this man?”

I was too stunned to think about my answer, or why he was asking. “Yeah,” I said. “Course.”

“You a relation?”

“Uh,” I said, and tried to look past him through the little window in the door. Was Johnny in there? Could he see me? The cop stepped to the side and blocked the window. “No,” I admitted. “We’re, uh…” What were we? “Neighbors,” I said, which didn’t cover it but was as close as this guy was gonna get.

“Well, I can’t let you go in there, buddy,” he said, sounding a little less brusque this time, though not by much. “You know this guy’s been charged with manslaughter?”

If the cop had been like a huge cloud dropping down overhead, this was the first crack of thunder. “What, like arrested?” I didn’t know too much about law, besides which ones would split my family up if my brothers broke them. Could they do that? Arrest a kid in a hospital? “Can’t I just, I don’t know, talk through the door?”

He shook his head. He shook his neck too; they were like the same part of his body. Just big thick shoulders and then _bam_ , head. A real bruiser, this guy. “Can’t let you do that, bud.”

“Why, what do you think he’s gonna do? He’s a kid. I mean, look at him, where’s he gonna go?” I wanted to push past, walk in there anyway, talk to John, ask if he was okay. I didn’t, but I was on the verge of seeing if I could shove past and shoulder the door open real fast when I realized that if I was Dallas, I _would_ do it. I’d launch my little bastard body right across the hallway and get my arm dislocated, probably, by this huge steer of a guy, and get myself charged with something stupid. I took a deep breath. “Can you tell me when I _can_ see him?”

He huffed. “I don’t control that information,” he said, all stiff. “Like I told his other little pal on Monday: go home.”

_Monday?_

I left, taking my time just so he knew I wasn’t intimidated, although I was. If there had been a guard outside John’s room since Monday…then likely the other pal the cop was talking about would be Pony. It was Saturday now. And he’d said nothing to me. I wondered if he’d even spoken to Soda. But Soda hadn’t passed the news my way, so chances are he hadn’t.

I sat down on one of the benches when I got outside. It was a beautiful day, still warm out, sparrows flying all over the place cheeping and chirping, the leaves just beginning to turn. People walked past – hospital patients, some with nurses, some with their families, moving slowly, chatting quietly. A young couple strolled by, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, half-making out without looking where they were going. On the bench across the street, three middle-aged guys were eating sandwiches; I heard their loud laughter and a faint ‘ _fuck!,_ ’ interrupted by a passing car. I was the only one who was alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, a couple days' delay - but next month I hope to get back on track! I've done all the legal research I need to now, I think, so we're headed into M-finally-puts-their-mock-trial-background-to-good-use territory. Been saving a different Darry chapter for sometime in the future, but realized he was the only one of the characters I intended to feature that didn't yet have a narrating spot (still not sure if I'm gonna do one with Steve, poor guy, I just do not know a thing about him at all).


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The United States government sends an...invitation.

**_October 12 th, 1967_ **

**_Two-Bit Matthews_ **

I got the letter a week after my eighteenth birthday. Columbus Day, which we had off from school, so I went and got the mail myself. Ma was working, and I was mowing the yard (so I was having a beer on the front step and just listening to the radio and kind of staring at the mower every once in a while). Saw the guy walk up, and I waved at him, but he stuck the bills in the box anyway instead of coming over to give them to me. Then again, I didn’t walk over to him, either. Guess neither of us were as polite as all that. And I guess I was lucky that none of the boys were there that day, or I would’ve had to show it to them as soon as I got it. Sort of a relief, really.

I don’t know. I just never really liked to make a fuss.

My first thought was surprise, actually. Not that I’d _gotten_ one, that wasn’t surprising. But if it wasn’t happening to you or your buddies, you kinda glossed over it, you know? As my ma would say, _there but for the grace of God go I_. I didn’t know if I thought God had anything to do with who did and didn’t get letters, but it was a little bit of a shock to me that I was the only one. At least, among us, I was the only one. Darry had a couple friends older than him who I knew had got sent. But he hadn’t, and he was twenty now. Might’ve had something to do with being his brothers’ legal guardian in his case, but then, guys who had kids still got sent. And you’d have thought it would’ve come down on Tim or some of his older friends by now. We must’ve had a lucky streak or something. Until now.

Second thing that got me was that it was kind of funny, in a way. I mean, maybe it figured that I was numero uno. Everybody else already had something wrong with their lives, and I was mostly just watching from the sidelines. If it was gonna be anybody, it had _better_ be me. I read the letter over again and held it up to the bright sky so the sun shone through the watermark and it got me laughing a little bit, if you want to know the truth. There on my front porch on the last warm day that fall, Johnny Cash still going soft and staticky just inside past the screen door: _don’t like it but I guess things happen that way_. Looking out on the long brown grass and the empty street, crows arguing up on the phone wires. This paper in my hand telling me what my future was. So I didn’t even have to decide it for myself. 

See, the universe _does_ have a sense of humor.

So I got up, and I mowed the yard.

***

Ma didn’t think it was as funny when I showed it to her later. She looked like she does sometimes if she gets some rough news down her neighborhood gossip pipeline – so-and-so’s granny just passed; did you hear about Sheila’s niece? shame, nice girl – and her lips got thin and she just shook her head and put her fork down with a clunk. “ _Keith_.”

It was her disappointed sigh, or something close to it.

“It ain’t gonna happen until after I graduate,” I said. I sounded all hopeful, too, like that was somehow supposed to make this not the big fat deal it was. Don’t know how that tone crept out, but I felt a little stupid about it, hearing myself speak.

She deadpanned, “Well, if I’d a _known_ there was a way to make you take your schooling seriously.”

“ _Ma_ ,” I said. We both knew college wasn’t in the cards. 

She shook her head again, and after a moment she spoke up in this deliberately normal voice, like we were talking about some of that gossip from her friends and not us. “Y’know, it’s funny, now that I see this.” She tapped the letterhead. “Not many boys around here got one yet that I seen.”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved just not to be sitting in silence. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“You just special?”

“Must be.” I went back to my plate, but suddenly she stood up, and the we’re-just-chatting look was gone from her face and replaced by this papery blankness. I got up too, because I was sort of afraid she was going to fall over. “Ma?”

“Just –” then she pulled me in by the elbows and hugged me, hard. That was rare in our house. It wasn’t that my Ma wasn’t affectionate, she just wasn’t, you know, real physical. I put my arms around her too, and pulled her in close. I was taller than her now. Not by much, but by enough that I could see over the top of her head, all the little curly grey hairs starting to overtake the red. It was weird to think of Ma without red hair. Someday she’d have an ol’ grey bun like…like a librarian, or something. She still smelled like work: lemon from a can, Borax. The little bit of spicy perfume she wore every day even though she wasn’t ever going nowhere special. Her strong, skinny arms gripped me almost too tight, like she wasn’t liable to let go soon.

“Ma,” I said, although I didn’t really mind.

“Right.” She stepped back and put her hands one on either side of my face. “Guess I’ve been asking for somebody to clean up your act for a while now, huh?”

I raised my eyebrow. “Oh, really? You have?”

“Oh, hush up. You’re gonna be fine. S’long as you shave up them sides like I’ve been telling you.”

“Hey, I do hard work to look like this,” I said, pulling her back in. That way she could get a little misty-eyed without me having to see her do it. I knew she’d want that, since I did. The thing about me and Ma, see, is that even though we don’t talk about it, we understand each other better than anybody else. “It ain’t even happening yet,” I said again. “We got time.”

“Well. And dinner’s getting’ cold.” I heard her sniff a little bit, but when we sat back down she looked completely normal. Halfway through our shepherd’s pie, she said, “You heard from that friend of yours lately?”

“They’re not letting any of us talk to him, I told you that.” It had to happen sometime, I guess – the whole ‘John stabbed a kid’ thing wasn’t just going to disappear – but I guess there was a part of me that hoped maybe it would just be…overlooked for a while, at least until he was better. Although as I understood it, “better” was a relative term for him, since the doctors down there didn’t think they were gonna get John walking again no matter what. Also, it seemed like you could at least factor in the amount of lives someone had saved, right, if we lived in a fair world? Tally it all up, and the saves outweighed the kills with him pretty strongly.

But that’s why I’m not making laws, I guess. It had been a week or two since they’d put the guard over there, but I went down every couple days or so anyway. I hoped maybe he wouldn’t feel abandoned if he knew we were out there arguing with the guys on the other side of the door, so I’d always raise my voice a bit.

“So Marie told me,” Ma said. That surprised me a little, that she’d talked to his mom. Normally the lady avoided people like the plague, although that’s not a great comparison since the only plague involved was her.

I must’ve made a face, because Ma frowned at me and said, “Well, the woman’s in a state. I’d be, if it was you. Anyway, I meant the other one.”

“Huh?” I was still thinking about Johnny. Darry had come up to me the other day all bent out of shape worried about whether or not his brother was going to get hauled into court too. So far nobody had said anything to them about it, not no cops, no lawyers, nothing. But Darry was pretty sure he’d at least have to go in as a witness. I’d listened and made the sympathetic faces and all that, you know. But I couldn’t exactly give him advice, and that was what he really wanted. The only person who he could’ve asked that would give him a straight up answer would have been Dallas, and – well.

“Yeah, that ratty little mean kid,” my mother was saying.

“…Ma.”

“The one I’m always telling yous boys to quit traipsing around with.”

“Ma.” 

“The little blond jailbird, that one?”

“ _Ma_.”

She waved her hand in the air. “All right, all right. You know. I guess I just wondered why I haven’t seen him slouching around anymore.”

Her and me both.

“He the kind that takes off when things get rough?”

I was pissed off at him, sure, but I couldn’t say that. It just wasn’t factual. “He’s the kind that takes off whenever.” Now _that_ was the truth.

Ma gave me her _what’d-i-tell-ya_ look, and again, I was pissed off at Dallas but I didn’t exactly enjoy seeing it. I wished more than anything that he was here, not because I always liked having him around but because...well, for one, I just didn’t get it. Why now? He’d spent almost a week out of his mind upset over John, and then the second the guy started to recover he just lit out? How did that figure?

Except that he was Dallas, and who knew what was going on in his head. He was probably in jail somewhere or holed up in some rodeo girl’s apartment or something. I’d always gotten the impression that he went around with us more or less because he had nothing better to do. We weren’t exactly his natural crowd. Too soft for him, I always thought. Maybe he’d finally gotten bored. Maybe we were too much hassle. Maybe he was worried Johnny would rat him out as the person who’d given the guys the gun and told them where to hide, and he didn’t want to be around for when that happened. John would never rat on him, and you would think he’d know that, but like I said. It was Dallas. Who fucking knew?

Ma got up to start cleaning from dinner, and I followed her and helped without her asking tonight. I figured if I only had limited time in this house, I’d better not screw around. While we worked – her washing, me drying – I started thinking about Dallas again. My problems weren’t going to really kick into gear until this spring. And in the meantime, maybe it was my duty to help fix some of everything else that was going on. Couldn’t do much more for the Curtis boys but help in the house. And while I couldn’t get to him in person, I started thinking that maybe I could still get something done for Johnny.

Like, I could track down Dallas, for a start. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I thought this was a fixit," you say, as I heap more problems on more people yet again. So first of all, it's a break-it-a-bit-more-and-then-fixit. New genre. I just invented it and it fucks. 
> 
> It's discussed in pretty oblique terms in the chapter, but the letter our boy just got was from the military, since he is over the age of eighteen now and in '67 the draft is in full effect. This is the height of the Vietnam war right now, and while my wish-fulfillment brain says 'make everything okay,' my writing brain says 'and have what plot?' So we'll get back around to this in one way or another. I WILL NOT KILL HIM. That's the kind of self-spoiler I'm willing to give, since I want to reiterate that this *is* supposed to be a story where people heal and grow up (whatever it looks like it's doing right at the moment). Also it was a good excuse for me to NOT have to research legal stuff for yet another month. March will LIKELY be another Johnny chapter, though, which means I can't put off digging into my mock trial background much longer.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Johnny considers his motives.

**_Mid-October, 1967_ **

_**Johnny Cade** _

“I don’t know what we’re gonna do about the porch,” Ma said. She kept tapping the arm of the chair. Nervous habit. _Taptaptap. Clickclickclick_ with her nails, then _taptaptap_ with the pads of her fingers. “Falling apart as is. Gonna have to figure something out.”

She was looking at me with that expression she does, the _this is your fault somehow_ one. She was right, I guess. If what happened to me hadn’t happened – and it wouldn’t of if I hadn’t run away, and I wouldn’t of done that if I hadn’t got in the fight, and I wouldn’t of done that if I hadn’t of gone to the movies – then she wouldn’t be worried about how she was gonna afford to fix the porch so I could get into my own house. How _we_ were gonna afford it. _Her_ house. She always said, _my house_ , I guess to have something to herself when almost everything wasn’t. Even when Dad would get home, she’d say _are you gonna come into my house like that_ , and usually he wouldn’t even notice she hadn’t said _our house_ or _your house_. Even when I was with my friends, sometimes I said _my mother’s house_ and not _my house_.

“Well, hey, look on the bright side. At this rate, you don’t hafta think about it for a while yet,” I said. Stupid thing to say, but I get stupid around her, I don’t know. I talk to her like I don’t talk to nobody else I know, not my friends, not people at school, not teachers, _definitely_ not Dad. “Be in here till kingdom come.”

She rolled her eyes. “When’s that lawyer supposed to be here?”

“He already was,” I reminded her. It was the first time I’d met him. He hadn’t said much, just introduced himself and that he had been appointed by the city court to defend me. First time any of that legal stuff had felt even sort of real. He was a little guy, soft and sort of bland-looking, like if you took a graham cracker and made it into a person you’d get Dennis Chambers, attorney. He had this short, receding hair and glasses and overall looked like he couldn’t of defended a potato salad from an incoming fly. He told me to call him Dennis, he was one a those adults.

“What’d he say to you?”

“Just gave me his name and stuff. Coming back tomorrow I guess.”

“That’s not a bright side, you know, John,” she said. “This?” She waved her hand around at the room, at me. “This ain’t a bright side.”

 _Hell, do you think I don’t know that?_ I didn’t say that, I wasn’t suicidal, but I thought it.

“Are you trying to be funny now or something? That your thing now, you’re a funny guy?”

“Ma, don’t.”

“Don’t _ma don’t_ me,” she said, standing up. She’s short, my mother, but she wears shoes that give her a couple inches and then she makes them count. She strode over the couple steps from where she’d been sitting and stared down at me. “I’m asking you if you think you’re trying to be funny?”

I looked down toward my feet. There was a little bump under the blanket, and that was about the only evidence I had they were even there. “No, it’s not, I’m not being funny. Sorry.” It _wasn’t_ funny, and I hadn’t been _trying_ to be funny, but like I said. Something about the two of us trying to talk to each other. I took a breath – not too big a one, it was hard to do that without sending this shooting pain all the way up the middle of my back where the skin was tight and blistered – and tried. “Just don’t know what else you want me to say.”

I expected her to do her usual thing. You know. _How about, why mama, I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. Is it that hard?_ But she just stood there with her arms sort of at her sides. She’s always doing something with her hands. Folding her arms, waving them around while she talks, jabbing a finger into her palm to make a point. She didn’t seem like she knew what to do with them today. I look like her, a little bit. Same dark hair, same dark eyes. Same nose, same cheeks. You can’t tell our baby pictures apart, except that we only have two of hers and they’re all yellow with age. If she was a man I’d probably look _too_ much like her by now. I don’t look a thing like Dad. Except for the shape of my chin. She raised a hand finally and flicked underneath the nail, like she was clearing some dirt out of there. She puts on nail polish every day, and she cleans at the hotel for a living. You can always smell it in our house because she’s always got to get another coat on there after she comes back home from work. “I don’t know,” she said, still looking at her nails and not at me. “Don’t know.”

I didn’t want to ask, but I did. “You talked to Dad at all?”

He was out driving, which usually meant two weeks or a month before he gets back. He went out the day after I ran. Said to my mother that he’d see about me when he got back. I could just imagine the tone he’d of used.

“Your father has not called me since before you landed your ass in here,” she said. She uses this voice when she’s real hacked off at him. Each word snaps out of her individually and then gets strung together. She pronounces everything a lot less drawl-y than she normally talks. Really _enunciates_. She says when she first moved out here she talked way faster than anyone else in the area, but her accent’s smoothed out over the past twenty years. I know it’s true, too. I’ve met her sisters, and some of them talk so fast and their accents are so strong I don’t know what they’re saying half the time. And that’s when they’re not talking Spanish.

I used to know more, but Ma doesn’t use it all that often. Partly I think it’s Dad. He ain’t ever said it out loud so much, but he don’t like her family and he don’t like being reminded they exist. Or that she’s part of them. So mostly all I remember are the swear words, and some prayers. There’s something I heard one of my aunts say to my little cousin once, something about _I want to put you in heaven_ , and it don’t translate exactly but it’s like, I love you so much you belong in the skies. I think it’s something you say to little kids. Or your lovers. But I don’t remember it exactly; that was the first time I heard it.

The language they teach at school is French, but I never took it. I’m not good at writing in English, let alone anything else.

“We could send him a postcard,” I said, I guess because the _idiot_ switch inside my head hadn’t turned off yet.

“Don’t be a smartass, John.”

“Yes’m.”

“I’m going to work,” she said, picking up her bag from by the chair. She’s second shift, so she starts midafternoon and don’t get back until after dark. “I’ll be back tomorrow. If that lawyer comes back I want to know everything he says.”

“Yes’m.”

At the door, she suddenly turned around and dug in her pocketbook. “Oh.” She tossed me something, it hit the sheets and almost slipped onto the floor before I caught it. It was cold, like a coin, but when I looked at it there was a little engraving of a bearded guy holding a tiny portrait of an even tinier Jesus. There was a loop where you could tie it to a string and wear it. Saint Jude. “From Martina. I guess she figures you need the help.”

Martina is the only one of my mother’s sisters she talks to on the regular. She lives other side of Tulsa, but I still don’t see her except every couple years. They just talk on the phone and send cards for holidays. I wondered if Ma had told her what had happened to me or if she’d found out in a newspaper or something. Did they know about this stuff all the way in Tulsa? But I wasn’t about to ask. Ma’s shoes clicked like her nails as she left down the hall, and I stared at the medal for another second. Then I put it on the bedside table and tried not to think about what it meant.

***

When the lawyer came back the next day, he asked me how I was feeling. It took me a long time to answer him, because to be honest I wasn’t sure. I hurt but I’d been hurting for weeks. I was bored but that wasn’t something to complain about what with everything else. I missed my friends but I couldn’t do nothing about that. And I didn’t know what was gonna happen next and Dallas was gone and I had stabbed a kid and I kept forgetting about it for hours on end and then remembering with a sick lurch in my stomach but…I don’t know. I had started to feel kind of stupid for how I’d behaved back when I first got hurt. How scared and weepy I’d acted. I didn’t remember all of it but what I did remember was like watching someone else, someone younger and weaker than me. It was exactly like after the time I’d got jumped; how I felt like I was outside of me watching this terrified little boy with blood all over his face. And…I hated seeing him. Hated watching how other people got around him. I couldn’t put it into words except to say that I didn’t like people treating that boy like he needed help. Didn’t like feeling like him. Times like those I got kinda jealous of…well, of Dally. Because he had figured out how not to get looked at like that. Ma was rude and brisk and angry and I even felt bad for telling her to get lost that time, because at least she hadn’t acted like anything had changed.

But I wasn’t about to tell this guy all a that. And a thing about me is that I can get used to just about anything. So I just told him I felt okay mostly and hoped that would be it. It wasn’t. He wanted an _update on my condition_ and that’s exactly how he said it, like he was trying to talk around something.

That was worse than the way my mother or any of the guys had acted. “You wanna know if I’m gonna get out of here or what?” I asked.

“Well, son, I –” he said, and it was the _son_ that really bothered me. I don’t know, he didn’t hardly know me. Plus he looked way too young to be _well-sonning_ anybody.

“Mister,” I said, “I ain’t trying to be rude, but what’s it to you? That ain’t what you’re here for, is it?”

“They tell me you’ve got another surgery scheduled,” he said. _God, he just couldn’t let a thing go, could he?_ What had he done, gone and interviewed the nurses? “When’s that?”

I gave him as much of a shrug as I could. “Gotta wait until the skin’s more healed, I ain’t so blistery.” It was making me nervous, him not saying what he was here to be saying. Had me thinking it was gonna be bad when he finally got around to it.

He gave me this a weird, kind of strained smile. It puffed his cheeks out like a chipmunk and his little eyes were bright behind his glasses. “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”

“Ain’t likely to make much difference. Might get a little more sensation back is all.” That was what I’d got told, and I’d had time to take it in and all so it didn’t sound so sad when I said it out loud. All of the boys had got this look on their faces when I’d told them though, back when they were still allowed to be in here. I was almost glad not to have to see that look anymore. When the doctor had been talking to me about it I’d tried to play it off sort of, so he knew I could handle whatever he told me. _Long as I can piss by myself_ , I’d said, because it was the sorta thing I thought Dallas would’ve said or maybe Two-Bit. But as soon as I said it I knew it didn’t sound the same from me. When I cuss I sound desperate. You can tell I don’t do it as often as them.

I didn’t get into _that_ with the lawyer either. I just sat up a little straighter and braced myself. “Look. What do you got to tell me?”

He took a deep breath. The shiny look left his face and I thought maybe he just had a weird smile. He pulled out a notebook. “I’ll be honest with you, son,” he said, “I haven’t had the chance yet to learn much about you. And what I have been told is fairly contradictory. That said, my job is to defend you, and I’m going to do that. So let’s go over your case.”

***

That’s what he always called it, after that. _My case_. Not _the case_ or _our case_. My case, so that I would keep in mind probably that it was serious. Made me wonder why he’d assume I didn’t know that, but then maybe he defended lots of people who didn’t take it serious. He said he was gathering statements from witnesses so that he could put together a self-defense argument, so I knew he was going to go talk to Pony and probably his brothers and the rest of the guys. He asked me if there was anyone else he should know about and I told him what I’d been telling everybody about Dallas: that he only came out to get us at the end of the week we spent in the church, that was all the more involved he’d ever been. Told him I’d heard about the hideout from somebody I didn’t know who, at a party or something. Nobody knew about the gun he let me borrow. Far as I knew he still had it with him so I didn’t tell Dennis about that either. I said if he could find him he was welcome to talk to him but nobody knew where he’d gone off to. He said he’d been told much the same by others. I wanted to know who all he asked about Dally, but he didn’t tell me that. Maybe he wasn’t allowed.

I tried not to let it bother me, the whole thing with him being gone. There was so much else I had to think about and…if he hadn’t wanted to say it when he’d _been_ here. Well. He was probably never gonna. And maybe it was all in my head after all. We hadn’t never talked about it. And I wasn’t about to ask nobody else whether or not I was crazy thinking what I did about him.

Just better to put it out of my head.

But. Still.

“If you can get ahold of him I wanna talk to him,” I told Dennis.

He said it was inadvisable, since if he got ahold of Dallas it would be as a witness.

“And that means I can’t talk to him?”

“Let’s worry about reaching out to him first,” he said. _Reaching out._ The way he said that was funny enough that it got me to laugh for the first time in any talk I’d had with that lawyer, and he didn’t see what was such a gut-buster, but he wouldn’t. _Reaching out_. Like Dallas was a guy you had to call for some company business and he’d run through some numbers for you. I think I split open a healing blister over that one. Maybe it wasn’t so funny after all but I just didn’t have much to laugh at then.

Eventually, not the first day but later, I got up the nerve to ask Dennis the question I’d had for a while. Was it even self-defense if I had been defending someone else and not myself? He said it was “defense of another,” that was what it was called and it fell under the same category and that was what we were going to argue my case as. I didn’t know why it was _my case_ but * _we*_ were the ones arguing, and I didn’t ask. He said he wanted me to write down everything I remembered about that night and be as detailed as I could and I asked him how much time he was gonna give me. “Don’t worry about that,” he said, “just be thorough.”

But I didn’t know how thorough I could be. I didn’t want to say it in case it hurt my chances of…whatever chances I was supposed to have here. But I remembered exactly everything about that night. It was the memory of the fire and afterward that was fuzzy and bad. But the night at the fountain? What I’d done? That was crystal clear. They were all bigger than us, and I remembered exactly how hard they’d pulled my arms back trying to keep me put while they dunked my friend in the water. Exactly how long they’d held him in there and me thinking he was going to drown. Breaking away from those guys and tackling Bob, _defense of another_ in Dennis’s terms. I couldn’t believe I’d actually got him down on the ground, to be honest. I think it was the surprise. I’m lots smaller than him. That was how he got me the first time. It was only seconds, him on the grass and me kneeling over him. And I knew I had drawn the knife to try and hurt him, because ever since I bought it that had been the thought running through my head. _If he tries anything again_ , I thought, _I’m going to kill him_.

So maybe, I don't know. Maybe I’d just wanted him dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! Again, apologies for the delay in between chapters; March was not a good month for me and if you've been out of the loop for a bit, I was dealing with a car accident for the first half of it and needed some time to recoup. But we're back at it again, and I plan to post a little mini-chapter snippit of something for y'all sometime this weekend as an extra to make up for the missing month. It's good to be back :D 
> 
> As you'll have noticed, our hero is doing his absolute damnedest not to give certain things(or people) much deep thought. He is surprisingly successful...for now. The amount of time before he ISN'T remains to be seen. As I may have mentioned before, I've made the executive decision not to sweat the legal and medical stuff too much, since this fic is for fun and while I *do* find research fun, research on a deadline is significantly less so. THAT SAID, if any of you are better versed in either field than me and you see any glaringly weird stuff that you think needs addressing, PLEASE do let me know and I will edit accordingly. I think that stuff will be at a minimum due to my *extremely* savvy strategy of just not going into detail whenever possible, but anything can happen.
> 
> For anyone curious (or just those of yall who didn't grow up Catholic), St. Jude is... the patron of lost causes.

**Author's Note:**

> Should I upload one or two of my outsiders-themed playlists to this fic aye or nay? 
> 
> They're good playlists.


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